


looking for someone who's looking for us

by river_of_words



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Drama, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Loss, Post-Episode: s12e05 Fugitive of the Judoon, gallifrey grief
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-19
Updated: 2020-07-03
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:56:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 27,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24805810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/river_of_words/pseuds/river_of_words
Summary: Doctor and Fam land in Bristol 2020. Guess who still lives there. It's Bill, Bill still lives there.Bill wants to know what happened to the Doctor, you know, catch up, like you do when you haven't seen your friend in 2 years.The Fam wants to know, god anything, somebody tell them something, anything at all, they are begging.Everyone wants to know What Is Up with the Doctor.Nobody has the full picture (except for the Doctor but she doesn't talk).Set somewhere between Fugitive of the Judoon and Haunting of Villa Diodati.
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor & Bill Potts, Thirteenth Doctor & Yasmin Khan & Graham O'Brien & Ryan Sinclair
Comments: 99
Kudos: 136





	1. reunion

**Author's Note:**

> so i tried to stick to some kind of timeline, but honestly i have no idea how time works in the show. like 12x1 is about a year after they start travelling right, but all of s12 doesnt span a year? and 11x1 comes right after 10x12, but how long did bill travel with the doctor? i have no idea.  
> so i tried my best but don't look too closely at the numbers, it probably doesnt add up

Almost two years after returning to Earth, Bill still heard the Tardis in every forceful gust of wind, in every creaky door, saw flashes of blue around every corner.

She and Heather had travelled the universe for a bit, and eventually come back home to Bristol, at a point in the Earth’s timeline not long after they had left. They had debated it – ten years had passed after all, for Bill anyway – but had decided this way was better than letting their friends and family think they were missing and/or dead for ten years. Heather had said Bill could still pass for 26, and then worked some universe-altering magic on her and then she really could.

It was hard to settle back into normal human earth life. Those ten years had still passed even if they didn’t show on Bill’s face. She had been turned into a Cyberman. Heather had powers beyond any human that were terrifying if you thought about it a little too long so Bill generally tried not to. But they’d acclimated. Found a flat, jobs, went back to university. Things were good.

Except.

Except for the one professor-shaped hole in Bill’s life. And in the university office that Bill passed every day where now instead of a big blue police telephone box, stood a house plant. Which, you know, was nice too.

In the beginning, she’d been looking for him. But after the hundredth time of being deceived by her own wishful thinking, she’d resigned herself to the fact that he’d find her if he ever came looking. And if he didn’t come looking, then she hoped he was out there somewhere. Mucking in, helping out.

She didn’t need that life back. No, her life was good the way it was now. That didn’t mean she didn’t want to see him again though. Letting go was _really_ hard.

But she was trying. Which was why, when she was walking home one spring afternoon, she almost walked right into it before she noticed one suspiciously inconveniently placed police telephone box.

She stood frozen on the spot for possibly an eternity before she remembered that breathing was a thing and inhaled deeply. Her hand was reaching to touch the splintery wood before she fully realised what she was doing. It was solid beneath her fingertips. It was real.

“Doctor!” She tried the doors but they were locked. “I knew you’d come back!” She pounded with her fists. “Doctor, are you in there? It’s Bill!” She knocked again but there was no response. Well, if he was out, he’d come back eventually. She’d just wait here. She leaned her back against the Tardis and enjoyed the sun in her face.

* * *

She had slid down to sit on the ground and was dozing a little bit when animated voices got her attention. Barely anyone had walked past the entire time she’d sat there so four people at once was notable. She scrambled up. A boy, a girl, and an older man, being led by a woman in a big flappy coat who was waving something around that looked like a magic wand. _How’s it sonic?_ It made a noise.

The sound of their good-natured arguing bounced around the empty street.

“...burning ice planet you said! Well I’m not seeing any burning ice and I can’t help but notice, Doc, this looks suspiciously like Earth. We’re home.”

“We’ll get there! Patience is a virtue, Graham–”

“Look who’s talking.”

“–and you’re not home. You’re in Bristol.”

“Right, so, what is there to see in Bristol?”

“Loads of things! They’ve got the fairest, goodliest, and most famous parish church in England–”

“What?” the girl said.

“–the oldest continuously operating theatre in England–”

“Okay?” the boy.

“And! This strange trail we’re following that is definitely not of terrestrial origin. I just haven’t figured out what the source is yet, but when I’ve done that and made sure it isn’t threatening one of Britain’s most popular tourist destinations–”

“You like Bristol or something?”

Okay, that was the Doctor, definitely the Doctor, and... friends? Fast approaching. What to do, what to say? Bill hadn’t planned this far. Her own voice from her most recent conversation with Nardole echoed in her head and it was not helping At All.

When they were about 10 meters away, the Doctor finally looked in Bill’s direction. And stopped dead in her tracks so abruptly that the boy ran into her.

“Hey wha–” he began, but Bill was already running towards them and throwing her arms around the Doctor.

“Doctor!”

The Doctor, or the person she had until half a second ago assumed was the Doctor, did not reciprocate at all. Bill promptly let go.

“Oh my god I’m so sorry I thought you were someone I knew I’m sorry–” she turned around to flee when the girl said “Doctor?” in that familiar tone of voice that Bill had often enough heard come out of her own mouth. That tone that meant ‘Doctor can you please explain the situation and how you’re going to prevent our imminent deaths?’ Bill stopped and frowned. So it _was_ actually the Doctor then. She turned back around, was about to say ‘Doctor?’ herself, in this instance meaning more ‘it’s actually you right?’ and less ‘how are you going to prevent our imminent deaths?’ Bill didn’t think their imminent deaths were a main concern right now. The Doctor seemed less convinced. She was slowly shaking her head and as she stared at Bill her expression went from shock to something very cold, and furious. She wasn’t saying anything.

Eventually the boy decided the silence had gone on long enough.

“Uh, hi.” He offered his hand. Bill tore her eyes from the Doctor and shook it.

“I’m Ryan.”

“Bill.”

“That’s Graham, and Yaz.” He pointed. “And the Doctor, but I guess you already knew that.”

“Yeah, uh,” Bill looked at the Doctor again, “We used to travel?” she said, more to the Doctor than Ryan.

Eyebrows got raised and glances exchanged between Ryan, Graham, and Yaz.

“No.” Quiet like the moment before a storm breaks.

“Uh, yeah! Maybe your memory’s failing you in your old age, but we definitely did!” Bill pointed at herself. “Bill Potts.” To the Tardis behind her. “Alien spaceship inexplicably named in English.” Gestured in the general direction of the university a couple of blocks away. “St Luke’s. You basically disappeared. It was a whole thing in the news–”

“No!” The Doctor took a step towards Bill and involuntarily stepped back at the cold fury in those eyes. “Not this. Not again. I am _not_ doing this again!” Bill’s hands moved up slightly in a placating gesture, or maybe surrender. “Do _what?_ ”

The Doctor pointed her screwdriver at her, seemingly more because it happened to be in her hand than with intent to use it.

“I don’t care who or what you are, or what you want, but I don’t have time for this. Whatever you were planning. Don’t even try. Just leave. I’m not asking.” She pushed past Bill, into the Tardis and Bill was left standing in utter bewilderment with three strangers staring at her with varying degrees of apprehension, suspicion, and confusion.

“Come on, gang!” came from inside the Tardis, and Ryan, Graham, and Yaz looked at each other and then hesitantly went inside. Bill followed, because she didn’t know what else to do.

“Doctor,” Yaz started as the three of them walked over to where the Doctor was busy around the console and Bill closed the Tardis door behind her. The Doctor looked up, saw Bill.

“Get out.” She was walking towards Bill like she was going to physically push her out the door. Bill was speechless.

“GET. OUT.”

“This is how you greet a friend?” Bill couldn’t help the hurt that crept into her voice.

“Bill Potts was my friend. She _died_ , being brave, being kind, being _herself._ I don’t know what you are but you are _not her._ ”

“Sorry to lower your estimation of me by not being dead then.”

“ _Don’t_.” The ice cold fury in the Doctor’s eyes made Bill involuntarily take a step backwards. She’d never seen the Doctor like this.

“You don’t insult her, you don’t impersonate her, you don’t use her for your own ends. She’s not yours to take. You leave. her. alone. _now_.” Though she now wasn’t taller than Bill anymore, she was more imposing than the Doctor had ever been when Bill had known him.

“I’m not impersonating anyone!”

“ _Stop it_.”

“Doctor, it’s me. I’m really Bill!”

“Last chance.”

Bill swallowed. It really didn’t sound like an empty threat. It took quite a bit of resolve for her to say: “No.”

At that the Doctor just deflated, storm clouds in her eyes dissolving to leave only a deep weariness. She dragged a hand over her face and looked up like she was asking the universe rather than Bill.

“Why. Why? Why! Why are you doing this?” She looked back at Bill. “What do you want?”

Bill was taken aback by the quick shift, but at least she had an answer to this question.

“For you to talk to me like a person!” She said, her own anger starting to drown out the hurt and confusion.

The Doctor blinked. “What?”

Bill groaned incredulously. “Stop yelling at me and talk to me like I’m a person! Because,” She threw up her arms in frustration, “I am! Again, now! No thanks to you!” It wasn’t fair, but she wasn’t being treated fairly. So. “And I’m your friend! Still!” She looked at the Doctor again. “Or so I thought.”

There was a moment of ringing silence. Bill felt the steam that had driven her little tirade quickly dissipating. She wasn’t actually angry at the Doctor. Not about that anyway. She had forgiven him for all that a long time ago. What she was angry about was being yelled at and threatened. Angry, and hurt.

“I deserve better than this,” she said quietly.

The Doctor hung her head. “Yes, you do,” it was almost a whisper. Then firmer, looking up again, “But you’re not her.”

“I am!”

“You can’t be.”

Bill took a step toward the Doctor, looking her in the eyes, and, like the hundredth time might somehow convince her, Bill said slowly, “I am.”

The Doctor took a step back, raised her head, challenging, “Tell me how then.”

Okay, now they were getting somewhere. “You remember Heather?”

The Doctor nodded. “Puddle girl.”

“Don’t call my girlfriend puddle girl.”

“The pilot,” the Doctor acquiesced.

Bill smirked. “Better. She came back for me, made me human again.”

“No, wait, but,” the Doctor shook her head slightly, like she was being confronted with incompatible facts. “But that wasn’t– I assumed– no that wasn’t, that wasn’t real, I thought–” She looked at Bill, finally with something other than hostility in her eyes. Something more like a kind of hope. “You really got out?”

“I really got out.”

“You– you’re fine, you’re okay?” A really breakable kind of hope.

“I’m fine,” Bill smiled, “I’m really good.”

The Doctor’s determined posture faltered and she exhaled shakily.

“Bill, I’m–”

Bill didn’t have the patience for this. “Can I hug you now?” The Doctor nodded and Bill threw her arms around her.

“I’ve been waiting for this for so long,” Bill sighed.


	2. fraternization

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bill makes some new friends.

There was the noise of someone bumping into something with the explicit purpose of drawing attention.

The Doctor had let go of Bill, turned around, bounced to the console and started pressing buttons –conspicuously avoiding any and all eye contact – before Bill had even remembered that there were other people in the room. Three people in fact. Looking bewildered and confused.

“Uh Doc?”

“Hm?” Those buttons sure were interesting.

“Care to catch us up here? What’s happening? Who’s that?” He gave a little apologetic wave at Bill for talking about her in the third person. Bill felt like she’d been invited to a party and then left in the hallway.

“Hm? Oh yeah, fam this is Bill,” she gestured without looking up, “Bill this is–”

“We already did that bit,” Ryan said.

“Who is she _to you,_ ” Yaz clarified, and then looked at Bill, still standing close to the doors, apart from the others all clustered around the console.

“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to talk about you like you’re not here,” Yaz said, and Bill shook her head slightly to let her know she didn’t blame Yaz. This was the moment for an invitation of some kind, which everyone in the room seemed to be aware about except for the person they were all waiting for to extend it.

They all looked at the Doctor. The Doctor was oblivious.

 _Pretending_ to be oblivious, Bill was pretty sure. This was great, she felt so welcome.

Right, if nobody else was going to try and save them from this socially akward nightmare, Bill was going to have to. And if the Doctor wasn’t going to kick her out, she was going to make herself at home. She started slowly wandering around the console room.

“I didn’t know you redecorated.” She touched a glowing pillar. She couldn’t tell what it was made of. Seemed almost like a crystal, a stalagmite, something grown. “Completely different theme this. More... beehive. Way less kitchen.”

“Kitchen?” Graham asked, curiosity piqued. Bill looked at him, an ally in her quest to make conversation.

“Oh yeah, before, it looked like, like a really posh kitchen, you know? Like the ones you see on cooking shows? All metal.”

Graham’s eyes widened. He turned to the Doctor. “That true, Doc?”

“It didn’t look like a kitchen,” came a reluctant grumble from behind hunched shoulders.

Bill grinned at Graham. “It totally did.”

Ryan touched a pillar. “Doesn’t seem easy to remove, all this.”

“But it looked different?” Yaz asked.

The three of them looked very eager – like their curiosity about Bill might be sated with answers to their questions about the Tardis – the Doctor didn’t seem willing to provide either. Bill inspected the blue glowing shapes in the walls, still circling outside of the centre where the console and the others stood.

“And you realised the seats were a bit redundant then?”

The Doctor looked up at that, glancing around as if to verify that the chairs were indeed gone, but didn’t say any more.

“Seats?! You had seats? Why’d you do away with them, Doc? I could use a seat the way we get tossed about!”

“Yeah I wouldn’t mind a seat either,” Ryan said.

“Yeah but see,” Bill said, coming up from behind a pillar to lean toward Graham like she was telling him a secret, “you couldn’t reach the controls from the seats, they were too far away. So they were a bit pointless.”

“Not for passengers though!” Graham looked at the Doctor. “Eh?” She glanced up at him for a moment, not _really_ glaring.

“You like to sit on the stairs though, don’t you?” she said, gesturing with her head to the stairs. Something passed between the four of them in that moment. Like a pinball, shooting from the Doctor’s words – whose tone seemed to betray a subtext that was lost on Bill – to Ryan’s and Graham’s glances at each other, bouncing off of Yaz, whose irritation spilled out through her pursed lips and barely suppressed sigh.

It was so fast, Bill felt like she got hit in the face by it.

“You still haven’t explained how you know Bill, Doctor.”

“Aha!” The Doctor looked at them triumphantly. Bill had a feeling the triumph was more because she’d found a way to cut off this line of conversation than it was because she had found the alien. “Got it! It’s an Uhq. Harmless. Probably just got lost. They live underground on their native planet, so it probably got into the sewers. That’s how it’s moving about.”

“Doc, we’re not going to–” but she was already rummaging in a box she had pulled from underneath the console and pulling out supplies. A rope, a net. She swung the big coiled rope around her shoulder and grinned at them.

“Yep!”

She was out the door before they could protest any further.

Graham groaned and followed after her.

Bill thought the Doctor’s timing was a little too convenient, and when she caught Yaz’s eye as they followed after her, Yaz seemed to agree.

* * *

Not particularly keen to get into sewers, the four of them followed the Doctor at a less enthusiastic pace. Yaz quickly fell in step beside Bill.

“You knew the Doctor before then?” Straight to the point.

“Yeah, he was my professor, or tutor actually, at St Luke’s.”

“He,” Yaz said slowly. It wasn’t a question exactly. Bill saw gears turning behind Yaz’ eyes that mirrored the ones in her own head. Like they were trying to solve the same mystery with different sets of clues. Like they would be able to figure it out, if only they could find the right questions to ask each other to get the answers they needed.

Graham appeared on Bill’s other side. “So that’s what this regeneration thing's about then? She changes what she looks like?”

Bill looked at them for a moment, considering. She didn’t know what might be overstepping boundaries. She didn’t know where she stood between this new Doctor and her new friends.

“How long have you guys been travelling with the Doctor?” she settled on as neutral enough conversational territory.

“About a year and a half, almost two,” Yaz said. Bill felt a lot of unspoken words float between them like a cloud. Ryan joined them at Graham’s other side.

“Right,” Bill grinned involuntarily at the memories of a colony city built by tiny robots and elephants on the thames, “having fun?”

A beat. Then:

“Oh yeah mate its the best!”

“Amazing.”

“Best year of my life.”

Despite the momentary hesitation, Bill saw in their eyes the wonder and excitement reflected that she felt thinking about those travels. There weren’t many people you could share your experiences of travelling with the Doctor with.  
“Highlights?”

“We met Rosa Parks!”

“Really?”

“And Tesla.”

“Tesla?”

“He basically invented wifi.”

“Huh.”

“We met my nan when she were young.”

“Aren’t there, like, time travel rules against that sort of thing?”

“It’s okay as long as you don’t interfere.”

“Oh you must have been in big trouble then.”

“What?”

“Interfering, that’s the Doctor’s entire mo.”

Bill grinned at the three and they burst out laughing.

“What about you?” Yaz asked when they had calmed down. There was a slightly sharp undertone in her voice. “How long did you travel with the Doctor?”

“Yeah about a year.”

“Oh.” Something relaxed in Yaz’ voice. Jealousy? Bill couldnt be sure. Maybe _she_ was jealous. Seeing these three new people running around with the Doctor, having adventures. She was making an effort not to feel replaced.

“Any stories to share?” Graham asked.

“We basically jumpstarted a human colony civilisation our first time out,” Bill said, trying not to sound too proud. “Also saved the lochness monster from being mined for fuel in the Thames in 1814.”

“Okay I want to hear that story,” Ryan said.

* * *

As they trailed behind the Doctor looking for the alien hiding in the sewers, Bill told them about how they’d just got back from the colony planet with murder robots and landed in London 1814 instead of Bristol 2017.

Graham laughed. “She still does that!”

Telling the story, Bill again felt her excitement of walking on the frozen Thames, seeing the attractions, the people, eating the food. And then, the shock of seeing the boy fall through the ice.

“What,” Ryan said, “she didnt save him?” Her own old disbelief mirrored in his face.

“He couldn’t. It was too late.” Since the conversation she’d had with the doctor then, having seen what she had seen after that, she’d come to understand the Doctor’s stance a bit better. His detached pragmatism from that time was still chilling, but she’d seen him be ready to sacrifice so much for others so many times – his sight for her, his brain for the world against the zombie monk supercomputer, his own endless life against the eater of light, and, in the end, actually giving his life for the people on the colony ship – that she didn’t doubt that he would always help if he could.

She skipped over the conversation she’d had with the Doctor about how many people he’d seen die, how many he had _killed_ , in her retelling. She wasn’t ready to think about that part. Also, there were experiences she’d had with the Doctor she didn’t want to share with anyone else.

As she told them, she realised she remembered more than she thought. Little things that had got pushed to the bottom of her memory, underneath all the adrenaline and running for her life. Like the way the Doctor had been with the kids, reading them a bed time story.

“So we get in there with this magic paper, right, and the Doctor is all ‘I don’t have time for outrage’, ‘let me do the talking you have a temper’, ‘passion fights, reason wins’ and what does he do? Punches the guy right on his nose!”

The others cheered, Bill laughed.

“I mean, I would have done it myself if he hadn’t but still.”

She remembered the speech the Doctor had made at Sutcliffe that had genuinely moved her. Related their bumpy ride in the carriage.

“Wait, two thousand, really?” Graham asked.

“That’s what he said.”

“She did say ‘thousands of years’, grandad.”

“I thought she was exaggerating! Didn’t you?”

Bill looked at them. “Yeah, no, probably not an exaggeration.”

She told them about how they were tied up in a tent on the ice, next to a pile of explosives. How the Doctor got their guard eaten by the fish. She wondered silently if that was why he lost count, that it sometimes wasn’t really clear whether someone’s death was your fault. But, Bill thought, if you were leaning on plausible deniability to not be a killer, that was probably reason enough to put another mark on your tally.

She skipped over how the Doctor had looked at her when he told her to give him an order. How he pushed a responsibility onto her that she only found out she was able to carry when she had told him to save the fish and watched him get to work.

Instead she gave them a thrilling account of a flash thaw, Sutcliffe falling in and drowning, her narrowly escaping the same fate, and how she had welcomed the homeless kids to their new home.

“And that’s how we saved the lochness monster and gave a racist capitalist’s fortune to a couple of kids.”

“And it didn’t eat Greenland?” Ryan asked.

“No, we checked.”

“And it’s still out there? A huge fish monster?” Graham asked.

Bill shrugged like ‘probably’. She enjoyed their awestruck silence for a couple of moments. “Oh come on, you guys have been around the universe. You probably have tons of stories like that.”

“Feels different being told about it,” Ryan said.

Bill thought he was probably right about that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> having bill and what her dynamic was like with 12 and putting her in the middle of 13's dynamic with the fam and having them all work in a scene felt a bit like trying to put two magnets with the same charge against each other. i hope i did everyone justice
> 
> find me on tumblr: https://you-have-to-use-your-imagination.tumblr.com/  
> or youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKkql7b3UhUnU2EaL8afmIA?


	3. collusion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bill opens Pandora's box. Jar. Wasn't it a jar originally? Bill opens Pandora's jar.

It took the net, the five of them and 45 minutes to get the intensely uncooperative Uhq from where they’d caught it back to the opening in the sewer where they’d climbed in. For some reason ‘harmless, probably just got lost’ was not a description that had made Bill envision something the size of a pig, with more legs than all of them combined, that kept trying to douse them in foul-smelling toxic goo. Like they weren’t stinky enough splashing around in the sewers. The Doctor had said it was a defense against the natural predators in its native habitat and thus probably wasn’t toxic to any of them.

“Loving the probably,” Ryan had muttered.

When they’d finally arrived back beneath the opening where they’d entered the sewers, alien in the net wriggling and screaming at their feet, they looked up and Bill felt the realisation fall over the five of them at the same time. It wasn’t going to fit.

They stood panting for a couple of minutes. The pretense of rest not really a pretense and also a good excuse for everyone to avoid the elephant in the room (Uhq in the net) for a couple minutes more. Bill had the feeling no one really wanted to be the one to question the Doctor. They were all seeing the same problem. No need to get snapped at by the Doctor – which they’d all already get their fair share of in the last 45 minutes – by stating the obvious. _Get snapped at by the Doctor_. None of this made sense. This wasn’t like the Doctor she knew. He was grumpy, condescending, kinda mean sometimes yes, but nothing like this. Not these below-the-belt punches pretending not be punches. He was private and evasive, yes, but not resentful of questions. Not cold. He’d never made Bill feel like he didn’t enjoy her presence. And it wasn’t even just Bill, she didn’t even seem to want the others around. And they were her freinds weren’t they? None of it made sense.

“Doctor–” Yaz wanted to get snapped at apparently, or was maybe just brave.

“I have a rope,” the Doctor cut her off. She dropped her rope on the ground.

“It’s not going to fit.”

“I can see that too, Ryan.”

Bill felt a bit sorry for him. The Doctor started pacing looking around the empty tunnel like it might provide a way to fit a too big alien through a too small hole. She got out her sonic screwdriver – what was she going to do? _scan_ the hole bigger? – seemed to hear what Bill was thinking and put it back in her coat pocket.

“What about the Tardis?”

Bill looked at Yaz in surprise. So did the Doctor. “What?”

“Can’t you use the Tardis? Park it here. We can put the Uhq inside right here.”

The Doctor glanced at the ceiling. It was high enough, Bill was sure Yaz had already checked as well.

“That’s not a bad idea, Yaz. Not bad at all.” Bill didn’t miss the expression that passed over Yaz’ face at the Doctor’s praise. Something a bit like victory.

“Okay, yes, good, I’m just gonna...” the doctor made a move toward the ladder to street level but trailed off seemingly when she realised that going to get the Tardis meant leaving the four of them alone here. Without her. With time to talk.

“No... You can’t... I can’t leave you alone here. It’s dangerous, there might be....”

“What? We already caught the alien.” Yaz said, pushing. Oh she was thinking the same thing as the Doctor, wasn’t she. She might even have made the suggestion with this outcome in mind, Bill thought. Bill looked back at the Doctor. Thoughts fighting on her face. How to wriggle out of this.

“ _Yaz and I_ will get the Tardis, you guys wait here.” Yaz’ expression fell. The Doctor turned around again to start climbing up the ladder.

“I’ll wait here.”

The Doctor turned around from starting to climb up the ladder.

“Sorry?”

Yaz’ seemed to be making her body language as deliberately nonchallenging as possible.

“I’ll wait here with them.”

“You don’t need to, they’ve got it.” Bill was not as confident in that. If that alien decided it wanted to get away, three of them would probably not be able to change its mind.

“They’ll need a fourth pair of hands if it starts resisting again,” Yaz nodded to the alien in the net that had just calmed down a little bit.

“Yeah I wouldn’t mind the help,” Ryan said.

“You don’t need me anyway.”

The Doctor was taken aback by that, looked almost wounded.

“I can’t help you fly the tardis. I’m more useful here,” Yaz clarified.

the doctor cornered. she wasnt gonna win this one.

“Right, okay, _fine_. Back in a mo!” she turned around and started reluctantly up the ladder.

“Alright, yeah, we’ll just wait right–” the alien wriggled and bill startled, “here! We’ll wait right here.”

“Yeah, don’t you worry about us,” Graham said, trying to encourage the Doctor to hurry up.

The four of them waited in a fidgety sort of silence, half an eye on the ladder creaking and shaking above them, pretending to just be waiting and not waiting for the Doctor to get out earshot.

“She always like that?” Bill asked the moment the lid fell on the hole and they were plunged in the darkness again, only illuminated by the light of their torches.

“No!”

“No, she–”

“Lately just–”

That was a yes then. But for all Bill knew that was just how renegeration worked. Change your body, change your personality. She didn’t know. But it didn’t seem right. 

Yaz asked the question that had seemingly been on her mind for a while.

“What was she like when you knew her?”

Bill grasped for words that would capture the entirety of what ‘the Doctor was like’.

“Uhhh eccentric university professor slash rock star? Sort of grumpy on the outside, real sweet on the inside. Like, like, sort of like a grandad.”

“What, the Doctor as a grandad?” Graham exclaimed.

Ryan snorted and looked at Yaz.

“I can’t imagine that at all.”

Yaz made a valiant attempt not to be thrown off balance. She shifted her weight and crossed her arms.

“How did you meet her?”

“Yeah so he was a professor at St Luke’s university right? I didn’t actually study there, I served chips in the canteen. But I came to his lectures because everyone did. They were the best. People who weren’t even in his class came to his lectures. And then one day he’s like ‘I’m gonna tutor you’ and it turnt out that tutoring meant ‘take on adventures through time and space’ which was awesome. Then the world got invaded by zombie monks–”

“What?!”

“Excuse me?”

“Zombie what?”

“You don’t remember that? Yeah the Doctor said that happens. Okay yeah so zombie monks brainwashed the entire planet and ruled for six months.”

“WHAT”  
“When was this?”

“About two, three years ago? Earth timeline.”

“Wish I had rememberd that, might have been more prepared for Tim Shaw,” Graham said.

“Who?”

“This blue alien, face full of teeth, it’s how we met the Doc.” He paused. “Grace, my wife–”

“My nan.”

“Yeah, she– she died.”

“Oh god, I’m sorry.”

“And the Doctor was really nice. She stayed. Helped with the funeral and everything.” 

“She felt guilty.”

“But it wasnt her fault!”

“No no, it wasnt her fault.”

“So the zombie monks that’s when you lost touch?” Yaz asked.

“No that was later,” Bill picked up the thread again. “We defeated the zombie monks. Well, I did. With my mum. Long story. But right so it turnt out the Doctor had this woman in a vault for like the entire time he was working at the university. Nardole was always pestering him about ‘not leaving the vault unguarded blablabla’. I thought there must be some kind of monster in there because of the way they talked about it but it was just...” Bill trailed off, suddenly breathless, hand reaching to her chest, which was smooth and flat and didn’t have a bulky metal unit replacing her heart. Her initial monster assessment had not been incorrect.

“A woman?” Ryan prompted.

Bill looked at him and blinked a couple of times. “Yeah, so I was like ‘what the hell why do you have a woman in a vault’, because that’s bad optics you know.”

Ryan nodded like he completely agreed.

“But she was like the only other one left of his entire species? That’s literally how he introduced her to me: ‘Missy, the other last of the Timelords’. Intense right? But this vault was like a prison and the Doctor was sort of rehabilitating her because she was evil and he wanted her to be good because they used to be best friends. He was so sure he could make her good, but...” She stopped, registering the looks on the faces of her audience. Recognition, horror. Yaz was openmouthed, her face cycling very quickly from realisation to confusion to hurt to anger. Bill didn’t know what she’d said but it’d definitely been too much.

And that is when the sound of the Tardis materialising filled the tunnel behind Bill. Great timing, Doctor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i was gonna update this twice a week and then i was like, why, i dont have the patience for this. we might all be dead by tomorrow and then i'd have 8 chapters sitting on my laptop unread by anyone but me. so here you go. maybe now someone else might also enjoy this except for me.


	4. intervention

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bill and Yaz both want answers. Their strategies for getting them differ slightly. Slightly.

“Alright, let’s get our new friend home then!” The Doctor swung the Tardis door open like she was catching them red-handed with something – which, to be fair, she kind of was – looking between the four of them like she’d be able to see what they’d been talking about still floating around their heads. Yaz turned away quickly, hiding her face, and started pushing the alien, which immediately started protesting agian, toward the Tardis. She nudged Ryan.

“Come on, give me a hand.”

With a considerable amount of effort, they eventually managed to the angry Uhq inside the Tardis and take off for its home planet. The air was heavy and tense, like lightning was about to strike. Who was going to be the lightning and who the tree? Bill decided the best course of action was to stay out of the way and sat down, sweaty and sore, against a wall in the shadows. The Tardis was cool and the humming of her engines vibrated into Bill’s spine, lungs, stomach. She watched everyone withdraw to their own little corner of the Tardis.

Ryan sat down against a pillar, out of sight of the Doctor working on the console. Graham hovered around him for a bit before settling down, distinctly unhappy, against his own pillar, also out of sight of the Doctor. Yaz sat on the stairs, in full sight of the Doctor, watching her. Yaz’ gaze was unyielding. Bill felt like she was watching a police interrogator staring at a suspect until they cracked and blabbed. With the way the Doctor was diligently avoiding looking even in Yaz’ general direction, Bill was pretty sure she felt it too.

On arrival, the alien got dumped out the doors without much ceremony or many words and before long they were back in the time vortex. The Doctor didn’t say where they were going and nobody asked. Yaz had given up her staring and retreated out of sight to another section of the Tardis. Ryan and Graham had followed her a little while later. The Doctor had glanced at them leaving. Bill took the moment of relative privacy to try and and get some answers now. She walked over to the Doctor at the console and leaned against a pillar. After a couple of minutes, the Doctor stilled and looked up at her, resigned. Bill raised her eyebrows. The Doctor sighed and looked away. Bill crossed her arms.

“You could’ve come say hi.”

The Doctor gave her a look of complete bafflement. “I thought you were dead!”

“So you checked then?”

The Doctor opened her mouth to defend herself. 

“Alright! You just left me there, nice.”

The Doctor straightened, offended. “I thought you were dead! You were a Cyb–”

“I remember,” Bill cut her off sharply.

The Doctor closed her mouth, regretful. “Yes of course.”

There was a pause, in which the Doctor avoided Bill’s eyes and slowly walked around the console, pressing buttons and fiddling with levers, to give her hands something to do.

“I’m assuming that means you haven’t talked to Nardole either then?”

The Doctor looked at Bill in genuine shock, “ _He’s_ still alive?!”

“You know, I’m not sure he can die?” Bill said, teasing grin playing at the corners of her mouth.

The Doctor relaxed a little, “Did too good a job with him,” she muttered, shaking her head. She’d stopped fidgeting and was leaning against the console. Old pastime of taking the piss out of Nardole managing to break through briefly before being drowned out by frustration. “Why is it always–!” She yanked a lever and the Tardis lurched.

“Sorry!” The Doctor quickly spun some wheels and flipped some switches and the Tardis stabilised.

Bill got to her feet, “Handrails! There used to be handrails!”

“Sorry, my bad. That was– my bad.” She punched a part of the console without any switches on it. The Tardis groaned at her and the Doctor glared at it for a moment. “Yeah yeah.”

Was the Doctor just fighting with everyone in her life?

“It’s just– it’s always like this. People die, or or–” she waved her hands around frustratedly, “or they _don’t_ die!”

Bill raised her eyebrows. “Yep, that’s how it works.”

The Doctor shot her a sharp look “ _I know that’s how it–_ you know what I mean!” Bill wasn’t entirely sure she did. For a moment she just listened to the sound of the time rotor going up and down and watched the Doctor trace her fingers over ridges and edges of the console, thinking about what Bill couldn’t even guess at. Suddenly the Doctor looked up, belatedly registering Bill’s words.

“Wait, you’ve talked to Nardole?”

“We stay in touch.”

“You still have your phone?”

“Super Space Phone? No, lost that, but Heather made me a new one. She can do basically anything she wants," she said, a little proud smile creeping up her face, getting to show off her girlfriend.

“Ah...” the Doctor nodded and suddenly jumped as if struck by lightning.

“Nardole! Hazran! The kids!” She ran around the console slamming buttons and pulling levers.

“Wha– wait,” Bill stammered.

“Stupid! Stupid, stupid!”

Bill was alarmed. “What’s stupid? What are you doing?”

The Doctor spared a second in her frantic buttonsmashing to shoot Bill a look that told her she was stupid as well. Bill shook her head, not understanding.

“I’m getting them! Stupid, stupid.” She yanked a lever and they made what felt like a U-turn, if there existed such a thing as direction in the time vortex, which there might be, Bill didn’t know. She grabbed onto the console to keep her balance.

“Should’ve got them a lot time ago. Stupid. Too wrapped up in my own–”

Bill wasn’t listening to her self-reproaching muttering.

“Woah, wait, I thought you can’t get there in the Tardis? It’s– it’s– black hole and all that.” The Tardis whined like it shared Bill’s objections.

“We got there last time.”

Bill’s eyes widened.

“But you can’t– you can’t take off, black hole, event horizon, that’s why the Master got stuck, wasn’t it?”

“You _can_ take off if you fly your Tardis properly.”

“Whoa, Doc, what are we doing?” The gang had reappeared in the console room to see what the sudden commotion was about.

“Eavesdropping, Graham?”

“You made me spill my tea. Where are we going?”

“You still don’t trust my driving?”

“I trust the evidence of my own eyes! And bruises!”

The Doctor scoffed. “We are going to rescue some kids from being eaten by Cybermen.”

Ryan and Yaz joined them around the console, trying to hold onto the crystal pillars.

“Cybermen?” Yaz was alarmed.

“'The most dangerous species in the universe, up there with the Daleks', those Cybermen you mean?” Ryan asked.

“Empire of evil?” Yaz added.

That sounded about right.

“Is that where that lone Cyberman is then, that’s where we’re going?”

“No, these are old Cybermen.”

Yes, old Cybermen Bill really didn’t want to see again. She tried to approach the Doctor to... what? what was she going to do? Slam her hand between the Doctor and the metaphorical steering wheel? Convince the Doctor not to go? She couldn’t do that. She didn’t want to do that. The Doctor should defintely get Nardole and those kids if she could, but Bill really did not need to come with on that trip.

“But– But the time dilation!” (“Time _what_?”) “We don’t know what floor they’re on, we’ll get stuck with no way back to the Tardis.”

The Doctor was undeterred. “We’ll start at the top and work our way down.”

“Through Cybermen?!” Maybe some of the panic in Bill’s voice finally got through to the Doctor because she stopped to look at Bill and her mouth formed a silent ‘oh’. She looked from Bill’s panicked face to her new fam and back to Bill. Then she nodded to herself like she was making a decision and started putting some switches and levers back. The Tardis spun around and they were all thrown to the ground again.

There were various groans of pain and protest.

“Seats! Just saying!” Graham yelled. The Doctor ignored him.

“Doctor! Please tell us what you’re doing!” Yaz said.

“Getting you home, hold on.”

“We’re already on the floor,” Ryan groaned.

They landed with a thump. The Doctor spun a screen around to look at the readings, then bounced to the doors to check outside.

“Bristol, 2020,” she bounced back to the console where the four of them were just getting to their feet and pulled Bill up, “10 minutes after we left,” she turned Bill by her shoulders and started pushing her out the door.

“You guys wait here.”

“You’re kicking us out?” Ryan sputtered. The Doctor let go of Bill, who kept walking to the door anyway, and grabbed Ryan and Yaz by an arm each, herding all of them out.

“Not kicking you out! Just have something to do. Better you stay here. On Earth.” Bill tripped over the threshold. “Safe,” the Doctor added quietly.

While Bill was enormously relieved to be given permission to not have to come to the colony ship, she couldn’t help but feel that it was a very bad idea to let the Doctor go back there alone. If Bill had trauma about that place, the Doctor certainly must have too.

“No!” Yaz protested.

“Yeah, and if you’ve forgotten, Doc, we don’t live in Bristol,” Graham said.

“I’ll be in and out, you won’t even notice I’m gone,” she tapped the side of the Tardis, “time machine. Take a stroll,” she said to Graham, “kiss your girlfriend,” to Bill, “I will be right back.” She stepped back inside and slammed the door.

“OW!”

“YAZ!”

Or _tried_ to slam the door because Yaz had put her foot in the doorframe to prevent being shut out.

“Yaz, what are you–”

“Shut up.”

Everyone froze. The Doctor stood stunned in the open Tardis door, one hand still on the door like she was going to close it the moment Yaz took her foot away. Which she was, Bill was sure.

Yaz hadn’t taken her foot away. And she wasn’t going to, Bill was sure of that too.

“You’re not _dumping us_ here.”

“Yaz, there’s no time–”

“YOU OWE US,” Yaz was out of patience, “you owe us an explanation.”

The Doctor almost rolled her eyes and then sighed, a sound so full of irritation that Bill did not envy Yaz at all. Yaz didn’t even blink. She had one hand against the doorpost to brace herself and one on the door, not pushing – yet – but not allowing herself to be pushed out. One foot still in the doorframe.

“We don’t have time for this,” the Doctor said, like she was explaining something to a child, “There are lives at stake, Yaz.”

“There always are! It’s a really good excuse because–”

“It’s not an excuse, it’s–!”

Yaz didn’t allow the Doctor to interrupt her, “–it’s true, _I know_.”

For a moment, Yaz and the Doctor just looked at each other. Nobody seemed to be breathing. Or that might have been just Bill. She wasn’t sure whether they were both pushing against the Tardis door or both waiting for the other one to start pushing. Was this really worth it? Whatever the fam wanted to know, couldn’t the Doctor just tell them? He had told Bill stuff. About regeneration, Timelords, Gallifrey. Missy. Whatever it was, couldn’t be much worse than her could it? And Bill had managed to wrap her head around it all, mostly. Seemed only fair to tell these guys what they wanted to know too. Especially if it was apparently so important that Yaz was going to start a fight over it.

The Doctor seemed to realise the same thing because the Tardis door suddenly swung inwards and banged against the wall on the inside, as the Doctor stepped aside to let Yaz back in. They’d both been pushing then.

Yaz walked in, still looking at the Doctor, who had admitted defeat and looked at the floor. Ryan and Graham followed Yaz less surely.

Bill wavered outside. “I’ll– I’ll just wait here then.”

The Doctor gave her a small helpless smile.

“Don’t leave without saying goodbye.”

The Doctor shook her head and went to close the door. Bill put her hand on it.

“I mean it.”

The Doctor looked at her. “I won’t, Bill.”

Bill looked at her for a moment and then nodded.

“Alright, laters.”

“Laters,” the Doctor returned weakly.

Bill watched her close the door and then went to find Heather.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 13 snapping in villa diodati was very good but you know what i really need to see happen now, i need to see yaz snap. let yaz yell at the doctor! i cant live forever on "when did you know" and "dont lie to us", please my crops are dying. 
> 
> yeah im just really hoping for a confrontation between yaz and the doctor next series, there's so much there that theyre not saying! yaz has so much to say to her! and the doctor deserves to be chewed out by the fam for how she's treating them. i just wanna see yaz say her piece and i want to see how the doctor reacts! like i really cant imagine how she's gonna react. if she's gonna shut it down like at the end of spyfall or maybe yaz can get her to engage? or would she get mad? like outwardly? is yaz gonna be like 'hey what is up your planet is dead and burning like what is up with that' after they break her out of prison. how would the doctor react to THAT. i wanna seeeeeeee.
> 
> but in the meantime i guess im just gonna have to write them do all that. yeah so i had a lot of fun with this and the next chapter for exactly this reason. making yaz push the doctor like 'youre gonna talk to me right now'. like i know i wrote it but i really liked writing it. also the next chapter is the first yaz pov chapter, there are two more after that i believe, of yaz pov.
> 
> and if anyone knows of any fics that have yaz pushing back at the doctor i'd love to have the link!
> 
> THIS IS A REALLY LONG TANGENT THAT DOESNT REALLY HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH THIS CHAPTER AT ALL BUT:  
> this is really quite tangential but watching episodes of older series now is so jarring! like you kinda get used to 13 and her withdrawnness but then you actually watch an episode of an older series and it's really jarring! like the contrast is suddenly soo obvious. 
> 
> like holding hands? previous doctors are holding hands with companions all the time. for 9, 10, 11, it's like running = holding hands. 12 even does it with bill in the first episode. i think he does it less because touch averse and like the only person he wants to hold hands with is clara by his own admission, but like he still holds bill's hand as they run! at least in the pilot, i think probably in more episodes but i cant exactly recall right now. i think maybe 12 runs a bit less than the others. but theyre all holding hands all the time! it's really jarring! and theyre hugging! 13 never touches anyone!
> 
> and then there's the amount of pushback from companions! they all push back at the doctor all the time! i was just watching the doctor's wife and amy goes: "But Doctor, listen to me. Don't get emotional because that's when you make mistakes." can you imagine one of the fam saying this to 13? she'd shortcircuit! i'd shortcircuit! and then a bit later amy says to rory: "He's not trusting us and he's being emotional. This is bad. This is very, very bad." like does the fam even know her this well? they wouldnt say the 'dont get emotional' to her face but do they even know to say it? do they even know thats like a thing thats happening? like they get she's not well obviously but whenever i now hear a companion say explicit stuff to the doctor that really implies how well they know them it's like, wow what. clara does it all the time obviously, amy does it, i havent watched 10 or 9 in a bit but like donna's "is alright special time lord code for really not alright at all" or i mean im pretty sure rose and martha push back all the time. bill does it all the time too.
> 
> im not sure if it's just my impression or actually textually that they do it less but i feel like the fam pushes back a lot less. maybe this is common knowledge idk.
> 
> like i said, this is tangential but this is my chapter notes i can do what i want and am drunk with power. also i have a lot of Thoughts. clearly.
> 
> hope you like this chapter (did i make these chapter notes accidentally half as long as the entire chapter? whoops)


	5. confrontation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The fam gets some answers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Yaz's previous suicidal ideation

Yaz walked through the Tardis door, past the Doctor, straight to the console and leaned against it. That was one escape route cut off. Ryan and Graham didn’t look as determined as Yaz made herself appear but she knew they would back her up. Earlier, on the way back from the alien planet, they’d gone over what Bill had told them. She wasn’t looking too much into things, Ryan and Graham had connected ‘evil best friend’ to the Master too. “The Master was one of my oldest friends, we went very different ways,” is what the Doctor had told them. Or rather, what they’d eventually managed to drag out of her. Yaz had replayed it over and over in her head. Trying to wring the tiniest drop of actual information from that impersonal waterfall of facts and names. Gallifrey, Kasterborous, Timelord. She hadn’t actually told them _anything._

* * *

In the corridor, earlier, trying to put together the information they had into something resembling a narrative, Ryan had remembered something Yaz didn’t.

“Remember what O said on the plane? ‘Best enemy.’”

“What does that mean? Best enemy?”

“Like a best friend?” Yaz suggested.

“And Bill said the Doctor was rehabilitating this Missy person because they were best friends,” Ryan said.

“And because she was evil.”

Bit of an open door, Graham. Yaz said: “But she was in some sort of prison. So why isn’t the Master in prison now?”

“He’s in– in that other place. The alien dimension,” Ryan said.

“That’s a sort of prison isn’t it?” Graham said, glancing at Yaz like he was both asking for confirmation from her as the only person with experience of the place, and also hesitant to see how she would react to being reminded of it. It hadn’t felt like a place you could get out of, no, but–  
“But she’s looking for him!” Yaz said. “She thinks he got out.” Or, _hopes_?

* * *

Sure enough Ryan and Graham took their places against crystal pillars just so that there was only one place left for the Doctor to sit, facing them all. Yaz didn’t know if they’d done it subconsciously or on purpose, but it worked either way. Yaz’s heart raced. Did she feel a little bad making the Doctor tell them things she obviously wasn’t ready to? Yes. Not enough to stop though. There was so much that they didn’t know about the Doctor and Yaz hadn’t really considered, hadn’t known to consider, until meeting the Master, that the information being concealed from them might be dangerous. That it might not just be personal, but things that could harm them if they didn’t know about them. They’d been patient with the Doctor, they really had. Reminded each other she’d tell them in her own time. Well, her time was up. Now she was going to tell them in Yaz’s time. Which was right now.

Yaz watched the Doctor close the door on Bill and slowly make her way toward the console. Her eyes flicked from Yaz at the console, to Ryan, to Graham, to the only open space for her to sit on the stairs and she looked at Yaz a little incredulous. _Seriously?_ Yaz raised her eyebrows at her – _yep –_ nodded her head toward the stairs.

“Sit.”

So the Doctor did, slowly, meticuously placing her coattails around her before looking up at them wearily. Yaz thought, Yaz _knew_ the Doctor’s eyes were a light, greenish colour, moving to honey depending on the light. The eyes that looked back at her now were bottomless black pits to drown in. No, not to drown in, to get swallowed by. Two tiny black holes. Yaz swallowed. She realised she hadn’t actually understood what ‘2000 years’ meant. Intellectually, yes. Emotionally, there’s no way to imagine anything even close to that. What did she, with her twenty years, mean to someone who had lived a hundred times that long? What did she have to say to someone that old? Why would the Doctor listen to _Yaz_?

“Well? I wasn’t kidding. Kids, eaten by Cybermen.”

Yaz gestured to the space they were in, “Time machine.”

The Doctor looked very unamused to have her own words thrown back at her.

“Get on with it then, what do you need explained?” God, was she condescending! Where to even start?! Yaz groaned in frustration and turned her back when she felt her throat close up and her eyes get hot. Mercifully, Graham jumped in.

* * *

Earlier:

“So this Missy person, we think that’s the Master right?” Ryan checked.

“I think it makes sense,” Yaz said.

“But Bill was talking about a woman,” Graham said.

“The Doctor has been a man,” Yaz said. “If she can change her body – regenerate or whatever – and they’re the same species, then the Master probably can too.”

“And that’s why she didn’t recognise him!” Ryan said, things falling into place.

To Yaz, the most terrifying thing that moment on the plane, when O had revealed himself to be not O, hadn’t actually been O – the Master, whoever – because she hadn’t known who he was, hadn’t known anything about him. Still didn’t. She hadn’t known what he could and would try to do. (Which was exactly the problem.)

No, the most terrifying thing had been to see how the Doctor had reacted to finding out who he was. Yaz had sort of believed the Doctor could take on anyone, anything. She’d got them out of so many dangerous situations, faced off with so many aliens, knew so much, was so quick and creative. Yaz didn’t ever _really_ feel in danger with her, didn’t ever _really_ question that she’d get them out of it.

But this time... Yaz had never seen the Doctor so scared, so destabilised. The Doctor had looked unsure that she was going to get them out of it. And in turn Yaz hadn’t been sure. She didn’t remember many specifics from that moment. Just the Doctor’s face. And the absolute spine-chilling certainty that they were going to die now. She was going to die now. When she finally didn’t actually want to anymore, she was going to die.

* * *

“I think,” Graham cleared his throat, “I think we want to know about the Master.”

The Doctor made a noise that was almost like a laugh if it hadn’t been so utterly devoid of anything that had ever even looked in the direction of joy. The parallel universe version of the Doctor’s laugh. Yaz suddenly felt like keeping her back to the Doctor was not a good idea and turned around to see her leaning back on the stairs, hands over her face.

“You couldn’t have picked an easier question to start off with?”

“We don’t know what the questions even are, do we?” Yaz snapped.

The Doctor looked at her, squinting between her fingers from her uncomfortable position on the stairs. She made a sound that Yaz interpreted as acquiescence and sat back up a bit.

Yaz took a breath to calm down and level out her voice.

“Bill said you were a professor.” It wasn’t a question, so the Doctor didn’t respond. “And you disappeared?”

The Doctor frowned. “I didn’t disappear, I was with you guys.”

“Explain.”

She took a deep breath. “The last time I saw Bill, things went a bit wrong.” She paused, grimaced, then amended: “Very wrong. I died, regenerated, didn’t go back to the university because I fell into your laps, train car, and sort of forgot.”

“You died?”

“Regenerated.”

“What’s the difference?” Ryan asked.

The Doctor shrugged like she didn’t know where to start even looking for the words. She made a move to stand, but then thought better of it and fell back down, one step higher than the one she sat on before. Yaz wondered if she was trying to put herself on eye level with them deliberately.

“It’s terrifying.”

The Doctor looked up, alarmed. “What?”

“That’s what you said, first night we met, remember? You talked about this to Grace and me. You said it was like being born, and that it was terrifying.”

“Did I say that?” The Doctor squinted an eye, faux-innocence. She remembered. Yaz let it slide.

“And you just forgot to go back to your job?”

“I was busy– We, we were busy.”

“So when we met you, you’d just died?”

The Doctor gave a little reluctant shrug.

“And lost Bill?”

The Doctor nodded.

“You didn’t mention her,” Yaz said.

“To be fair, I was a bit confused, I’d just regenerated and then fell down a really long way, smashed into a train car, and then there were aliens trying to kill people for trophies, so yeah I was a bit preoccupied.”

“You didn’t remember your name when we met you.”

The Doctor shrugged. “It happens.” Yaz gave her a slight incredulous headshake and then moved on to her actual concern with the revelation that when they’d met her, the Doctor had appparently just died and seen her friend die, and then left her dead friend behind, presumably somewhere on an alien planet. She leaned forward a bit.

“Doctor, _you_ _have never_ mentioned Bill.” This was what really upset Yaz. What was making her feel like the ground had vanished beneath her feet. What had made her confront the Doctor now, while she’d been waiting, hoping, for answers for weeks. Meeting Bill had made her reevaluate her entire relationship with the Doctor, who she’d thought they were to each other, all of them. Bill had once been with the Doctor like they were now. Ryan, Graham, and her. Were they just the latest in a long line? Long line of what? Friends? Weren’t they more? Weren’t they family? Were they? Ryan and Graham had each other, but Yaz, her family had no idea where she was. Would never know if she died on some alien planet. Abandoned by the Doctor, replaced with someone else she’d just bump into by accident. Her family would think she’d– _Sonya_ would think she’d have run away. Forever. And hadn’t she? Actually? Wasn’t that exactly what she was doing every time she stepped into the Tardis? Running away? From boredom, from her family, from home? She had put so much of her life in the Doctor’s hands. Was this smart? Was she valued? Or was she just the latest in a long line who’d end up dead and left behind?

The Doctor looked at the floor. Ashamed? She’d abandoned a girl for dead somewhere and moved on without a care in the world but at least she felt ashamed about it? Or maybe just ashamed of being caught.

“I know.”

Yaz almost missed it, she’d said it so quietly.

“Why not?” Graham’s voice was gentle, he moved to sit on the lowest step. Trying to change the interrogator-suspect dynamic to something a bit more like empathising friends.

The Doctor shrugged like it was obvious. “She died.” She looked tiny. "It was my fault.” A whisper.

“What do you mean, Doc?”

She looked at them with those black hole eyes, first Graham, stared at him, then Ryan, and then Yaz. Yaz got swallowed again but it felt different this time. This time it felt more like what the Doctor had told them after Grace’s funeral, when Ryan had asked about her family. _I carry them with me._ Yaz could see it. In those eyes. All the people she carried, all of their joy and love and presence. Their loss. Yaz felt herself get sucked into those black hole eyes and realised she was already in there. Being carried by the Doctor. Yaz’s joy and presence and love. Her life. Her inevitable loss. It was already in there. _She_ was already in there. Never to leave. The console suddenly didn’t feel like a very solid surface to be sitting on and she sat down on the ground quickly before her knees would do it for her.

“You always die,” barely words, mostly breath. The Doctor was still looking at them, at her.

“You always die and it’s my fault.” The combination of pronoun and tense choice was disorienting. Like Yaz was dying right now, like she had already died, like she was seeing her death, at many different times, in many different ways.

Four years ago, lonely roads, a car that isn’t police approaches too fast, she doesn’t care enough to move out of the way.

A year and a half ago, top of a water tower, Tim Shaw moves a bit too close, she steps back a bit too far, loses her balance, the Doctor isn’t quick enough to grab her.

A year ago, she finds the sonic mine, three... two... one..., the Doctor is too far away to shield her in time.

A few months ago, a crashing plane, the Doctor forgets about them, they aren’t there to remind her.

A few weeks ago, alien spaceship floating above New York, the scorpion queen orders to kill her, the Doctor is ten seconds too late.

Yaz closed her eyes so she didn’t have to see the Doctor’s anymore. She was dying, she was dying.

“Hey hey, Doc,” Graham’s voice was still so gentle. “We’re not dead.” Yaz heard the small smile in his voice. “We’re not dead yet.”

“No, no,” the Doctor said, like the whine of a wounded animal, “you are. You are dead and dying and gone again and it’s my fault, it’s always my fault.”

Yaz, seeing her own coffin a hundred times over behind closed eyelids, knew the Doctor was right. Knew in her quiet lungs and still blood that she was already dead. She felt the deathly cold of the Kasaavin realm. Didn’t feel her heartbeat.

“We’re not dead, we’re right here, look,” Ryan said.

“But we could have been,” Yaz said quietly. A shiver went through her and she opened her eyes. Alive again. They were all looking at her. She looked at the Doctor, sat up a bit straighter, a bit more determined.

“When we asked you last year, if we could come along, you warned us, said we had to be sure.” The Doctor looked at her intently, eyes wide like she feared what Yaz was going to say next.

“But how can we be sure if we don’t even know what we’re agreeing to?” Yaz continued, “We didn’t know about the Master. We didn’t know he was a threat,” _to you_ , she left unspoken. The Doctor’s wide-eyed look changed into one of dawning understanding.

“You should have told us about him. You should have prepared us.”

A pause, the Doctor looked between the three of them, then: “Yes, I should have. I’m sorry.”

Yaz waited but she didn’t say anything more, so she prompted: “You should tell us now.”

Genuine bewilderment. “Tell you what?” Yaz stood up, exasperated. She couldn’t decide if the Doctor’s genuine bafflement at their needing explanations or her faux-noncomprehension at their asking questions was more annoying. Both were _really_ annoying.

“Okay, let me put it this way: We meet someone, thinking he’s your friend, find our he’s been impersonating your friend but is actually also your friend, but evil. Introduces himself as your ‘best enemy’ and says his name is ‘Master’, then proceeeds to try and kill us by plane and then entire human race by mobile phone. And all you tell us about him is ‘he’s one of my oldest friends, we went very different ways’.” Yaz looked at the Doctor, eyebrows raised like ‘you seeing the issue here?’. Graham and Ryan had also got up and the Doctor stood up on the step she’d been sitting so that she was looking down on them. The Doctor didn’t see the issue here. She shook her head noncomprehending, fake or genuine, Yaz didn’t really care.

“Maybe where you’re from that’s enough explanation but us lowly humans are going to need a bit more,” Graham said. Yaz glanced at him, suppressed a smirk. Oh, he could match the Doctor in her passive-aggressive game any day. The Doctor stared Graham down for a moment, who gave her his sweetest smile. Then she stepped down the stairs until she was on the same level as them.

“We were friends, now he keeps trying to kill me and my friends.” She shrugged. “Not much else to it.”

“Uh yeah, aside from how you go from being friends to trying to kill each other!” Ryan said. The Doctor wandered over to the console and started idly fidgeting with buttons and switches. Yaz watched her silently for a few seconds, trying to piece things together in her head, then she said slowly: “Why did you send him to the Kasaavin realm if you expected him to escape?”

“It was the best I could do.” She didn’t look up. “He always escapes.”

“That’s comforting,” Ryan muttered.

“Were you _hoping_ he would escape?”

 _Now_ she looked up, affronted. “Of course not!”

“Then why are you so frustrated you haven’t found him yet?” A beat, no answer, so Yaz added: “Why are you still looking?”

“I told you, he left me a message.”

 _What is so important that you went looking for the person who wants to kill us?_ Yaz was about to say when suddenly all the puzzle pieces slammed into place.

_Missy, the other last of the Timelords._

_Where do you go?_

_Home._

_Why not with us?_

_The toxic grey expanse of Orphan 55._

Yaz stumbled backward. She looked at Ryan for a life raft but he just looked at her in confusion. He hadn’t put it together yet.

“Doctor...” she started cautiously, “What was the message about?”

“It’s personal.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i was about to post this and then i realised i made a continuity error. i think ive fixed it but man i hope i didnt make any other, bigger ones that i will only realise later.
> 
> i really like this chapter! i dont really have anything else to say about it i think. they get some answers but like, they still havent got a lot of answers. has the doctor even added to the information they had already got from bill? or that they had pieced together themselves? i think she might just have not-denied some stuff.


	6. invitation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Doctor picks a fight and loses.

In the end they managed to, with the help of the Tardis’ vehement protestations, talk the Doctor out of going to a cyberbattle right that very moment. Okay, maybe it was less ‘talk the Doctor out of it’ and more ‘the Tardis refused to go anywhere’ but Yaz still counted it as a victory. Ish. The Doctor had got very annoyed with the Tardis when she’d realised the dematerialisation lever didn’t actually do anything anymore and at that point Yaz, Ryan, and Graham had decided discretion was the better part of valour and quickly retreated to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. Witnessing a fight between the Doctor and the Tardis wasn’t just uncomfortable, it was uncomfortable and unsettling. Think watching someone shout at an entire ship is bad, wait until the ship starts shouting back.

The Tardis seemed to have only two moods, pleased and displeased, and they got expressed in its architecture. Doors didn’t lead where they used to, corridors turned and twisted while you were still walking them, gravity’s presence and direction changed at random (or in response to a perceived insult), not to mention it was questionable whether you’d have lights to navigate the impossible labyrinth by or had to do it all in the pitch black.

The Tardis was pleased with you, life was easy (at least in the 'navigating your sentient spaceship home' department). The Tardis was displeased with you, better try to get back in her good graces because you weren’t winning this fight.

That didn’t mean that the Doctor didn’t try though. Walking out of the control room in the direction of where they hoped the kitchen would still be, hearing the Doctor shout in the distance, Yaz was very glad she couldn’t understand what the Tardis was saying back. They passed a door behind which a large creature growled and walked faster, hoping the Doctor wouldn’t piss off the Tardis so much that it unlocked that door.

They found the kitchen without too much difficulty – the Tardis wasn’t displeased with _them_ – and discussed what they’d learnt while they drank their tea. It turned out to be less than Yaz had thought. Yes, the Doctor had explained some things, but they still didn’t actually know who the Master was, who he was to the Doctor, or why the Doctor was so off lately. If anything, the things she _had_ told them made her evasiveness about the Master stand out more.

Yaz didn’t say much, thoughts swirling, reeling from what she thought she’d put together, and not sure she wanted to share it. It might not even be true. She might be wrong. But if she wasn’t... It was a lot. It was too much. Too big. Planet-sized. She felt like she was being crushed under it, but telling Ryan and Graham felt wrong somehow. A transgression, or a violation, a mistake. As though, if she connected her – as of yet still potential – future destroyed planet with the Doctor’s – as of yet still hypothetical – present destroyed planet, she would be sealing the fate of both. She took a sip of tea she didn’t taste. Ryan and Graham would eventually put the same pieces together she had, if they hadn’t already. She just hoped, wished, begged them in her head, not to say it. Not to bring anything into existence by speaking its name. _The wrong word in the wrong moment._ If they all, the four of them, could just keep it out of the realm of the tangible, the material, the spoken, it would never need to be real.

Yaz was just taking her last sip of tea when the Tardis grumbled into movement. The Tardis had given the Doctor her way? Really? If there was one thing in the universe more convinced of its own right than the Doctor, it was the Tardis. The three of them tripped over themselves getting back to the controle room (through just one short straightforward corridor) to see where they were going. When they entered, the Doctor was looking at a display and groaning.

“No no no! I said I wouldn’t take her! Bill waits here and we get her _after_ we rescue Nardole and the kids. No, stop–” She tried pulling the dematerialisation back up but it was stuck.

“UUGHH! Why don’t you EVER listen to me!”

Yaz grabbed onto the console to try and stay upright. The Tardis made a noise that she guessed meant something like ‘because you never listen to me either’. The Doctor had decided to forgo trying to force the controls and just jumped straight to dismantling them. Yaz didn’t think that was going to make a difference.

“You’re _my_ ship, I don’t have to listen to– OW!” She jumped back as something sparked on the console. She kicked the underside of the console and muttered: “Should have stolen a different one.”

The Tardis beeped.

The Doctor scoffed. “You did _not._ ”

They materialised with a shock.

“Where are we?” Yaz asked, slightly concerned they actually just landed in the middle of a warzone. Or maybe the Tardis brought them somewhere really unpleasant to punish the Doctor. The Doctor didn’t go to open the door so Graham went to check.

“Is this– Are we back in Bristol?”

“I don’t even know where she lives!” the Doctor yelled at the Tardis. An address appeared on a display. In English, not the squiggly circles the displays were usually full of. The Tardis wanted them to read it. Yaz read it out loud. “Is this where Bill lives?”

“I’m not getting her, I said I’d get Nardole back first and then I’ll get her,” the Doctor said, half to them and half to the Tardis. She tried to yank the dematerialisation lever again but it didn’t budge.

“We’re parked right in front.”

Yaz looked at Ryan. “What?”

He held up his phone, google maps. “We’re parked right in front of her house.”

The Doctor groaned dramatically. “Of course we are.” She folded her arms on the console and dropped her head on them. “Incorrigible, is what you are.”

A roar came from deeper inside the Tardis, the same one they’d heard before, and footfalls. Pawfalls? From something heavy, and running. And growling. Yaz looked at Ryan, his panicked face mirroring hers. He pointed at the doors, she nodded hastily and they scrambled to the doors. Graham was already outside. The growling was rapidly coming closer. The Doctor was still glaring at the Tardis.

“Doctor!”

She sighed and started walking to the doors. “You’ve really discovered this ‘thowing me out’ thing, haven’t you?” she said. “Enjoy your peace and quiet, we’re not done with this!” and she slammed the door behind her. They stood outside the Tardis for a moment, waiting for the Doctor to make a move toward Bill’s house. When it became apparent she’d rather stand here grumbling at the Tardis, Ryan took the initiative.

“Alright, so should we go, get Bill? Or something?”

The Doctor huffed. “Yes fine,” and started walking toward the house.

* * *

Someone who was not Bill opened the door. Her eyes went wide in surprise and then, scanning over the four of them, settled into understanding.

“Ah,” she turned around, “BILL,” she yelled inside, “it’s for you.”

“Oh, the pilot!” The Doctor was staring at the girl with what Yaz thought was a rude amount of fascination.

“Heather.”

“You’re human now?”

“Generally.”

The Doctor looked down and was a lot quieter when she said, “Thank you for, er, bringing Bill back home safe.”

Heather nodded and returned to the living room when Bill entered the hallway.

“You should be thanking her for bringing _you_ back home safe,” Bill said.

“What?”

“We put you back in the Tardis. Didn’t you wonder how you got there?”

“It’s a bit fuzzy, all that.”

“Got Nardole and the gang out of there then?”

“Uh no,” the Doctor sulked, “the Tardis won’t let me.”

“She won’t _let you_?”

“She brought us here,” Ryan said.

Bill smirked, “I knew I liked her.” A beat as she waited for the Doctor to explain what they’d come for. “Come to say goodbye then?” she asked, eyes flicking to the three gooseberries Yaz felt they were.

“No, er,” the Doctor looked at her shoes, wavering. “Came to... want to come?”

Yaz had a feeling of déjà vu. But weird déjà vu. Upside down déjà vu. She couldn’t quite place it.

“Just one trip!” the Doctor continued hastily. “To apologise. For yelling at you, and the whole–,” she waved a hand around vaguely.

“I get it,” Bill said quickly. Then she grinned widely. “Finally she asks!” She grabbed a coat from a coat rack beside the door and yelled inside, “HEATHER, I’m going out!”

Heather came into the hallway, staring at the four of them, at the Doctor, barely breaking eye contact before kissing Bill. Yaz looked away, Heather was a bit intimidating.

“Bring her back safe,” Heather said, staring down the Doctor. Bill hit her in the arm, but it was gentle. A token protest. ‘Don’t be rude!’ Clearly she appreciated the concern Heather showed for her.

The Doctor saluted Heather. “Promise.”

* * *

“So,” Bill started as they walked back to the Tardis, “still negotiating unsuccesfully then?”

“They were fighting,” Ryan said.

Bill looked gleefully at the Doctor. “And you lost.”

The Doctor glared at her, “Don’t take her side, she’s smug enough as is.”

* * *

They listened at the Tardis doors but there didn’t seem to be some alien lion, or whatever the creature had been, wandering about the console room so it was probably safe. The Doctor knocked.

“I did what you asked, I invited Bill, now please can we come back in?”

Nothing happened. But nothing happened in a way that struck Yaz as distinctly irritable. She didn’t think it was her imagination.

“ _Without_ being mauled by some alien monster thing?” Ryan added. The Tardis relented and the door clicked open. Yaz shot Ryan an amused look. It wasn’t the first time she’d got the impression that the Tardis liked him especially.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this one and the next chapter are actually kinda one chapter but i wanted to change the pov halfway through so i split them. thats kinda why this feels like it ends in the middle of a chapter because it does.
> 
> also rereading all of this as i upload each chapter i feel like my plot is like the wooden house from the three little pigs. like it's standing but, barely. ah whatever i'll get better at it.


	7. reconciliation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Doctor makes good on her promise and shows them some burning ice.

As Bill filed into the Tardis after the others, the Doctor was already starting another argument with the Tardis.

“Please just don’t be difficult. I said I’d take them to Gliese 436b, that’s what I’m doing. That’s _all_ I’m doing!” she was hissing at the Tardis, “I’m just showing some friends a cool thing, you can’t have any objections to that!” There must have been a response that was imperceptible to Bill, because the Doctor rolled her eyes and sighed. Bill closed the door behind her. The Doctor looked up at them.

“Everyone inside? Hold on, here we go.” She closed her eyes and held her breath as she pulled the dematerialisation lever. Everyone braced themselves as best as they could without handrails or seats, but the takeoff was surprisingly smooth. Bill barely even noticed they’d started moving. The Doctor opened her eyes in surprise.

“Oh,” she said.

Bill walked over to her. “I think someone deserves a thank you.”

The Doctor looked at her incredulously, “For doing her job like she’s supposed to?”

The Tardis rattled warningly.

“Doctor!” Yaz admonished, taking a seat on the stairs, “Please don’t insult the pilot while we’re in flight!”

“The–” She turned to Yaz, face epitome of insulted, “ _She’s_ not the pilot, _I’m_ the pilot!”

“She’s better at it than you, Doc,” Graham said. “You should let her drive more often.”

The Doctor whirled around, being charged from all sides now.

“If you think you can do better, by all means.” She took a step back, inviting Graham to the controls.

“I’m not saying _I_ can do better, I’m saying _she_ can.”

The Tardis made a very smug noise.

“Oh shut up,” the Doctor grumbled, but there was no bite in it anymore. Clearly just having friends around, showing them cool space stuff, the Doctor was already more in her element.

Bill approached the new console. She hadn’t had the opportunity yet to look at it more closely. It was a far cry from the stark metal desktop from before. It was far less symmetrical for a start, looking like it had been collected and assembled over a long period of time, grown instead of designed.

She followed cables with her fingers to where they disappeared into the rock or crystal that the base seemed to be made out of. It looked like rock but it felt alive, warm where she touched it. She studied the pipes underneath, bent over the small intricate apparatuses on top. Almost touched one before she remembered they were in midflight and she had no idea what it might do. She straightened up abruptly and noticed the Doctor standing a couple of feet away, watching her, looking ever so proud.

“Thinking of stealing it?” she said, smirking at Bill.

“Nah, I don’t know how it works,” Bil said, playing along, she continued circling the console.

“It looks _so_ different,” she said, looking up at the Doctor. The Doctor bounced closer.

“Just the surface,” she said, “it’s all the same underneath.” She pointed at a little thing in front of Bill, “helmic regulator,” then at a little ruby rock: “interface stabiliser,” she started moving around the console, Bill following, “time vector generator,” she pointed out a collection of little glass vials with a glowing substance inside: “thermocouplings, over there,” a spinning thing: “gyroscopic stabiliser,” she crouched down and pointed to the underside of the console, “and right here, fluid links. Don’t tell Nardole. He’ll get his grubby little hands on them and it took me an hour last time to get it back in and working again.” She bounced back up and Bill laughed and followed. She looked past the Doctor and noticed Yaz sitting on the stairs behind her, watching the two of them.

Graham interrupted, “Hey Doc, have we missed an exit? Why is it taking so long?”

The Doctor huffed. “What did I tell you about patience?”

“What did I tell you about pots calling kettles black?”

The Doctor rolled her eyes. “We’re taking the scenic route.”

“Scenic? There aren’t any windows!”

Bill pointed at the windows in the doors and Graham went to look but turned back to Bill shaking his head disappointedly.

“Don’t argue with the pilot,” the Doctor was saying, waving a hand in Yaz’s direction as if acknowledging she was parroting her.

“Yeah, don’t argue with the pilot, Graham,” Ryan said. The Doctor was looking at a display.

“We’re almost there now, open the doors, Graham.” She put a hand on a lever, looked up at the Tardis.

“May I?”, then she smiled at something Bill couldn’t hear and pulled the lever. “Handbrake! Come on look!”

She bounced to the doors and they all gathered around to look outside.

“Welcome to the Leo constellation.”

“Wow,” Yaz breathed.

“What is that?” Ryan asked.

“That is the footprints in the sand behind Gliese 436b.”

“What?”

The Doctor ran back to the console.

“Stay there! Watch.” She started very precisely adjusting some controls. Bill turned back around to watch the spectacle outside.

“Gliese 436b has an outer layer existing of hydrogen and helium.”

The Doctor took the handbrake off and they started moving, slowly gaining speed until they were zipping past the gas cloud in the direction of, Bill assumed, the planet itself.

“It’s being evaporated by the radiation from its star.”

The planet came into view. Bill heard Yaz sigh beside her. She agreed with the sentiment. She would never get used to this. Seeing planets like this, from space, just a ball floating. Seeing Earth like this was incredible enough, but other planets, with different colours and surfaces, looking so alien and surreal but also real and tangible like you could just touch them. The Doctor joined them again.

“The core is rock. And between the gaseous atmosphere and the rocky core is a layer of hot ice.”

“That’s what you said! Hot ice,” Graham said, “how is that possible?”

The Doctor bounced on her feet. Teacher-mode activated.

“In our environment, you know, human, human-adjacent, there’s not enough variation in pressure to make water change state. If there was, we’d die. So in our experience, in our intuition, water changes state due to changes in temperature.”

Bill watched her. She was only missing a blackboard.

“Cold means solid, warm means liquid, hot means gaseous. But that’s not the only way for substances to change states. Just changes in pressure can do that too. This planet has a surface temperature of about 400 degrees Celsius, but the pressure on the surface is so high, the water is solid anyway. And there you go, hot ice.” Graham looked like he was trying to wrap his head around it.

“Can we touch it?” Ryan asked. Everyone looked at him and he got defensive. “What? You guys _don’t_ want to touch the hot ice?”

“400 degrees Celsius,” Yaz said.

“Alright, alright,” Ryan mumbled.

“Not to mention the pressure would make us solid as well,” the Doctor added.

“What will it look like when the whole outer layer has evaporated?” Bill asked. The Doctor grinned at her.

“Let’s take a look.” She ran to the console again. Bill watched her make some precise changes, muttering to herself. Or maybe to the Tardis.

“Okay, I think I’ve got it.” She spun a wheel and pushed a lever and came back to watch outside.

“What did you do?” Bill asked.

“Anchored the Tardis to the planet’s centre of gravity, hit the gas on the temporal motors. We’re gonna go stay in the same relative position in space, and going forward in time.” She grinned excitedly at Bill. “Very fast.” They teased her, but Bill had to admit, she was impressed. The Doctor knew what she was doing. Some of the time, at least.

“Nothing is happening, Doc.”

“Just wait a sec!”

For a moment, nothing seemed to be happening, the planet was stationary, but then the cloud around it started shrinking, faster and faster, the tail growing. It was like watching a video in fast forward, but they were fastforwarding, not the planet. Millions of years passing in the span of a heartbeat. Until all the clouds had vanished and they were left with a sharply glittering planet. The Doctor sprinted to the console to stop them speeding forward. When she returned Bill and the others had sat down in the doorway, following Yaz’s example.

“How many years did we just see pass by?” Yaz asked breathlessly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yes i did refer to the tardis as a ship with a pilot that you drive. im really mixing my modes of transport here.
> 
> alright, nice, they had a little break, time to make everyone miserable again
> 
> also! please dont factcheck me about gliese 436b, i dont know anything about physics or planets, i just looked at wikipedia for five seconds


	8. retrospection

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bill and the Doctor take a walk and don't really get anywhere.

After showing them the rest of the Top Ten Strangest Varieties Of Ice In The Leo Constellation – skipping number seven because all blue boxes of any size were outlawed there (“Nothing to do with me! That’s– There’s an unrelated, historical reason why that’s– Anyone want to see jelly ice? We can touch this one! Ryan?”) – the Doctor had parked the Tardis in front of a nebula and left the doors open for whoever wanted to watch. One by one, the others had quietly retreated out of the console room. Maybe it was evening and they’d gone to bed, Bill wasn't sure. She watched the nebula and listened to the Doctor puttering about the console. She still had questions. She wasn’t entirely sure what they were but she had them. ‘What happened to you?’ seemed to match the general way she was feeling – which was that she was missing a whole lot of context – but was a bit rude and also very vague. If she got an answer to that she wouldn’t even know if it had answered the question. And with the Doctor, she kinda wanted to know what she was asking before she had to try and parse any evasive non-answers.

She got up and started wandering around the console room. Orange and blue light danced around on the floor and walls like they were trying to chase each other out. Blue was winning, Bill thought. Still the same underneath, but it all looked so different. She wandered up the stairs. Walked the walkway that went around the console room, half-hidden by the swiss cheese beehive wall. She’d made almost two full circles before she realised what she was looking for.

“Hey, where did you put the books?” she called down through a hexagonal hole in the wall.

The Doctor jumped and looked up to find the source of the voice.

“Yeah, over here,” Bill waved. “Where are the books? You used to have loads of them up here.”

“What are you doing up there?”

“What are you doing down there?”

The Doctor glanced at where she’d been taking apart part of the console and then turned to Bill, blocking her view.

“Nothing.”

“Convincing.”

“Library, probably.” She waved a hand, presumably in the direction of the library. “Haven’t really had time to check yet.”

“Haven’t wanted to check.”

The Doctor shrugged and muttered “Same thing, isn’t it?”

Corridors branched off from the walkway. Bill tried to see where they led, but they were plunged in a haunting blue light that quickly faded into darkness. Or they ended in a sharp corner she couldn’t see past. 

“I never finished the book I was reading.”

The time between then and now became solid in the space between them. The Doctor watched Bill slowly circle around.

“You haven’t been back to St Luke’s?”

The Doctor shook her head.

“Not even for old times’ sake?”

“Not a fan of repeats.”

Bill wondered whether that was a way to say ‘get out of my Tardis’.

“Was I really in the news?”

Bill snorted. “You’re so vain. Professor of seventy years disappears, yes it’s in the news! You were popular, you know.” Bill watched the Doctor trying not to look too prideful. Watched her fail miserably. Bill hid her grin.

“They put up a memorial for you. In the university.”

The Doctor’s mouth fell open. Too easy.

“You can not go see your own memorial!”

“Why not?”

“Because! It would be gauche.”

The Doctor’s show of disappointment was great.

“Keep erasing myself from history, keep leaving traces anyway.”

Bill squinted at her through another hole in the wall. “I can’t tell if that was supposed to be self-reproaching or self-aggrandizing.” A thought. “If you really don’t want to leave traces you should get better at being undercover.”

Her show of offense was almost as good. It was like she was making up for all the facial expressions she hadn’t done last time around.

“I’m great at being undercover!”

“If you were, you’d fix your Tardis to blend in.”

“I– Wh– Well,” she stammered.

Bill leaned her arms on the inside of a hexagon and poked her head through, amused.

“You literally didn’t even change your name.”

The Doctor opened her mouth to defend herself and then abruptly turned and flipped a switch on the console. The lights dimmed.

“What’s that, standby mode?”

“Something like that.” She joined Bill upstairs. “Let’s go find your book.”

They went into one of the dark corridors, lights switching on a few meters in front of them and switching off behind them. A small sea of light floating through the darkness. It was a little disorienting. If not for the fact that the corridor kept changing, Bill couldn’t have been sure they were actually moving, instead of just walking.

Sometimes the wall changed texture, sometimes the width or height of the corridor changed, sometimes there were windows in the sides or in the ceiling looking out at things that made Bill question whether they were still right side up – was there an up in space? – sometimes there were doors or branching corridors. They walked in an almost companionable silence. A shared memory of a companionable silence. It was almost good enough.

“They emptied out your office,” Bill said, as they passed under what looked like an aquarium or was maybe just an actual sea. “About three months after you, uh, ‘disappeared’.” She made airquotes. “After they decided you were dead.”

The Doctor hummed her acknowledgement. Bill thought of the pictures on the Doctor’s desk, all the little knickknacks, the records and the record player. The guitar. “I tried to get my hands on some of your stuff, pictures,” she glanced at the Doctor, “but they wouldn’t let me have anything.”

She couldn’t read the Doctor’s reaction. There wasn’t much of it. Maybe the showy facial expressions were just a diversion.

“Well, thanks for trying.”

“Which doesn’t even make sense,” Bill continued as though she hadn’t stopped talking, “because you don’t even have any relatives or next of kin they could have given it to, so they could just as well have given it to me, I would’ve returned it to you. Not that they knew that, but like, no-one else was gonna claim it.”

The Doctor went so quiet and still at that, Bill felt like she’d been left alone in the maze of corridors. They didn’t speak until they reached the library.

“It should be right,” the Doctor pushed a door open, “here.”

The library was a great hall, open centre with book shelves all around the walls on multiple floors. The ceiling was high and domed and made of amber-coloured blocks. They seemed to emit a soft warm light. Like a nice spring afternoon streaming through the windows.

“Fiction over there,” the Doctor gestured to the whole right side of the library, “nonfiction over there,” left. “Then it’s sorted by topic,” Bill noticed category signs, written in a variety of languages, a couple of which she guessed were alien, but also English and that circular script she’d seen in the Tardis before, “then language, date of publication, and then alphabetical order with the title.”

She looked at the Doctor. “You _have_ been here!”

The Doctor ignored her and walked off to the nonfiction side. She didn’t ask Bill for the title of the book she’d been reading, so either she remembered or had left Bill to find it on her own. Bill only vaguely remembered what the book had been about, let alone the title. She shrugged and wandered into the stacks in the direction of philosophy.

* * *

An impossible to determine amount of time later – might’ve been half an hour, might’ve been the entire whatever-passed-for-night-in-space, might’ve been a century – Bill kept hearing a clock softly ticking in the background but she never saw one. It was grounding, a sense that even if she didn’t know how much time had passed, at least it was still passing, linearly – she had gradually moved from philosophy through biology and physics to history, picking up books that looked interesting along the way, and had entirely forgotten what she’d been looking for. Drawn in by the secrets of books that wouldn’t be written yet for another hundred years, fields of study that hadn’t been invented yet, medical textbooks about species that weren’t even carbon-based, ethical quandaries of civilisations a million light years away. When she returned to the open centre of the library, arms full of books, the light hadn’t changed. Still afternoon. Juxtaposed with the steady tick of the invisible clocks, it gave the impression of time moving and standing still at the same time. Of unwaveringly moving forward but never going anywhere. Of one minute being spent over and over and over again. Recycled time.

The Doctor was sitting at a table, reading a big book with a deep red cover. It looked heavy. Bill put her pile of books on the table, the Doctor looked up, closed her book.

“What are you reading?”

The Doctor glanced down at the book before looking back up and pushing it aside. “Poetry.”

“I thought you were in nonfiction.”

“Poetry isn’t necessarily fictional.” She looked at Bill for a moment, then slid a book Bill hadn’t yet noticed in her direction. “Found your book.”

Bill blinked in surprise. “Oh! Thank you. Forgot what it was to be honest.” She picked up the book, opened it at the bookmark, her bookmark.

“No one has been reading it since you,” the Doctor said, as if reading her mind. Bill closed the book, looking at her. The Doctor’s voice was... not flat, exactly, but absent, like she was speaking from a long way away. She pulled Bill’s pile of books toward her.

Bill sat down across from her. “Why are some of these books in English? Some of these books are about alien things, from different planets, how can they be in English?”

“The Tardis translates.”

“But some of them are in alien.” (The Doctor gave her a look at her use of the word ‘alien’ like it were a language.) “If the Tardis was doing its psychic translating thing in my brain, all of them would be in English.”

“No, I mean literally, the Tardis translates books sometimes.”

“Why?”

“Because she likes it.” The Doctor shrugged. “Because people want to read them.” She looked up, smiling at Bill. “Like you.” She pushed the book she’d been flipping through in Bill’s direction. “And you should. Read this.” It was a book from 2064 analysing the changes in the global political landscape in the first half of the 21st century.

“What, really?”

“Yes, it’s really good.”

“Totally thought you would veto that one.”

“Why?”

Bill shrugged, “Time travel rules or something like that, can’t read about my own future, or else paradoxes, catastrophe,” she mimicked explosions.

The Doctor shook her head. “Everything in here is pretty much fixed, not much you will change about it by being prepared.”

“That does not sound comforting.”

The Doctor looked grim, “It isn’t.” She was looking through the rest of Bill’s pile. “Not this one, not this either. You can read this one, actually yes, do that, I’m interested in your thoughts.” She pushed the book to Bill. The only reason Bill knew it was philosophy was because that’s where it had been shelved. It seemed to be a philosophical theory by some alien philosopher and it was full of concepts she didn’t even know how to begin to imagine.

“Thoughts? I’m not gonna have thoughts about it, I doubt I can even understand it.”

The Doctor just smiled at her, a little mischievously, and turned back to the pile, “Not this, why do I even have this?” She dropped it on the floor and picked up the last book. “And this is fiction actually, don’t know why it was in nonfiction.” She pushed the approved pile to Bill.  
“Wait, I can read these?”

“Yes, please do.” She shoved the rejected pile to the floor. “Not these though, but those, yes.” She noticed Bill grinning at her. “What?”

“You’re still an awesome tutor.”

The Doctor stood up. “I’m not your tutor anymore.”

“Yes, you are.” The Doctor bristled and started walking to the exit, only briefly turning back to grab the ‘why do I even have this’ book from the floor. Bill picked up her approved book pile and the fiction one – the Doctor hadn’t said she couldn’t read it – and quickly followed.

“Do you wanna know why? I’ve never got less than a First.”

The Doctor kept walking but Bill saw a reluctant little proud smile.

“You said if I got less than a First you’d stop tutoring me, and I haven’t, so.”

“Yeah, well, I died.”

“Same, but,” she had to jog a little to keep up, “one or both of us dying wasn’t part of the deal.”

“You can borrow the books.” They entered the console room again – not through the same corridor as they had left it – the Doctor clapped her hands and the lights undimmed. She walked to the doors and flung the ‘why do I even have this’ book out before closing them.

“Your bedroom is that way,” she pointed at the corridor the others had left through.

“It is?”

“The Tardis will show you, she likes you.”

Bill looked around at the Tardis, she felt like it was winking at her somehow. She went over to the Doctor, who had already resumed her ‘doing nothing’ at the console.

“Uh thanks but, can I stay here for a bit longer?”

The Doctor’s eyes snapped at her. “Why?” Sharp. Suspicious almost.

“I’m not tired.” Bill shrugged. “And I have books to read.”

“You can read anywhere, there are nicer rooms to sit than here.”

“Yeah, but,” stuck again. With questions she didn’t know how to put into words. She put the books down on the stairs. “I just wanna stay here, for a bit. Is that okay?”

The Doctor stared at her for a few seconds, eyes dark. Then she somehow deflated and Bill didn’t know from what, or why.

“Yeah... Yes, of course, stay as long as you want.” She looked around. “Sorry I don’t have any chairs.”

“That’s alright.” She picked up the top book from her pile and walked upstairs, gravitating to her familiar spot even if it wasn’t really familiar anymore. She felt like the old Tardis was still out there somewhere, waiting for her, with the old Doctor inside, ready to take her anywhere, everywhere. It was a traitorous feeling. This was the Tardis, this was the Doctor. She couldn’t be homesick for a place she was in. She sat down on the walkway, legs poking through hexagons, feet swinging over the side. She could just see the Doctor messing with the console from where she sat. She was adapting it, it seemed, or adding something to it, some new device or measuring apparatus. Bill braced herself and opened her book on the history of the 21st century.

* * *

Having just reached the 2010’s Bill got startled out of her concentration by a yelp and sparks coming out of the console. The lights around the room flickered and the Tardis seemed to be wincing.

“Sorry. Sorry! I’m sorry.”

“You okay?”

The Doctor jumped, seemingly having forgotten that Bill was still there.

“ _Fine_. I’m fine.”

“What just happened?”

“Put the thing,” she picked up a wire to illustrate, “in the wrong–” she waved the end of the wire frustratedly in the direction of the console, “in the wrong thing. It’s stupid. My own fault. Ugh.” She threw the wire down. Bill closed her book.

“Time for bed?”

“Yeah yeah sure just, that way,” the Doctor waved impatiently, still focused on her smoking console. Bill stood up.

“I mean you.”

The Doctor stared at her, annoyed. “Don’t you start as well.”

“Start what?”

“Telling me to go to bed. I’ve told them, I don’t need as much sleep as humans.” Bill walked down the stairs.

The Doctor muttered, “Finally get rid off Nardole’s nagging, get these three mothering me.”

“You really don’t sleep?”

The Doctor turned to her, crossing her arms. “I’ve actually slept a whole lot. After I regenerated I slept, then I got hit by a sonic mine, slept a whole bunch after that. I think I’m actually all good on sleep for the next, hmm, century I should think.”

That was a very normal and non-defensive answer for someone who was sleeping enough. Bill put her book back on the pile and sat down on the stairs. “Alright.”

The Doctor stared at her silently for a few seconds, waiting for Bill to say something else, and then huffed and went back to work. Bill watched her.

“What are you actually trying to do?” she asked when there were some more sparks and smoke and some hitting of things with a wrench.

“Trying to extend the range of the– you know what, it’s really not important.” She crouched down beneath the console and removed a panel. Through the hole she made, Bill caught a glimpse of the inner workings of the Tardis. Spinnings gears and pulsing pipes. It reminded her of a monster’s mouth.

“For something unimportant, you sure seem to be trying very hard.”

The Doctor stuck her arm down the Tardis’ mouth. “It passes the time,” she said curtly.

Bill watched as the Doctor gradually disappeared inside the Tardis. She thought about what she’d been talking about in the sewer to make the others react the way they had.

“Do you know what happened to Missy?” she asked as casually as she could, which was not casual at all. She put her hand to her neck absently, feeling her pulse. The Doctor, somewhere in the Tardis’ insides, dropped her wrench and it fell a long way down, hitting metal pipes and echoing all throughout the console room, like the stomping metal feet. Bill pretended not to hear it.

The Doctor climbed out of the Tardis to stare at Bill with dark, hollow eyes. Bill felt her heart beat against her fingertips.

“Missy...” It started like she had meant to say a word but dropped away fast into just an exhale. Her mouth twitched like she was going to laugh but instead she sat down on the floor in a way that just fell short of looking entirely deliberate. Bill was next to her in a moment, keeping one hand to her pulse. She didn’t want to think about this. She didn’t want to think about her. Him. She didn’t want to know.

“You’ve seen her?” she asked, because apparently her mouth hadn’t got the memo that she _didn’t want to know._ Her voice came from somewhere outside her.

The Doctor directed her gaze at Bill but her eyes were empty like she was looking at something else, something far away, inside her head. She nodded slowly.

“I’ve seen her– We, we’ve seen her. Him. He regenerated too.”

Great, he was the Master again. And still out there.

“Where?”

The Doctor blinked, like she was seeing Bill again. She shook her head.  
“He’s gone, he’s gone. Separate dimension. He’s gone.”

Bill exhaled shakily, “Okay... What–” she cleared her throat. “What did he do?”

The Doctor looked down, waved a hand tiredly, dismissively. “Murder, mayhem, the usual.” Her eyes were weary but her mouth moved in the direction of a grim smile. Bill didn’t get the joke. Suddenly a spark of life came back into the Doctor and she stood up abruptly.

“I really thought. I _really_ thought this time. I really believed! I’m stupid. I’m so stupid. I should never have–” She was pacing around the console, flipping switches so forcefully Bill was sure she was gonna break one.

“Every time!” She hit a switch. “Every!” Flip. “TIME!” Switch. “I don’t learn. I never! Learn!” She yanked out the wires of the thing she’d been trying to add to the console.

“I shouldn’t try, I shouldn’t _hope_! What’s the point! He never changes. He’ll _never change_.” She wrenched the thing loose from the console and threw it across the room. She jumped from the little platform the console stood on and paced up and down the room. The usually cavernous room shrunk down. The Doctor’s anger filling the whole space.

“If you’ve ever let this creature live,’ if only! If only I’d let him him live once but nooo,” she kicked the sad little measuring thing lying on the floor, wires hanging out from all sides, “I let him live again,” kick “and again,” kick “and again,” she opened the Tardis doors and kicked the thing out “and again and again and again!” She slammed the door and turned around. Bill involuntarily recoiled at the fire in her eyes. “His victims, they’re on me! They’re on me too! You! On me!” She turned away from Bill, looking up, addressing herself at the ceiling or the entire universe. “One more lifetime! HA! Won’t kill anyone! HA!” she yanked a lever, which decided it had had enough and came loose, and she went sprawling to the floor.

And then she just stayed there. Face down. On the floor.

Bill got up and lay down next to her.

“I’m sorry,” she said. Bill hadn’t liked Missy, didn’t like Missy, never wanted to think about Missy again, but the Doctor had wanted her to be good. So. Bill was sorry Missy couldn’t be that.

They lay on the floor in silence for a long time. After a while Bill started thinking about her coursework. And then she started talking about her coursework. What she had to write essays about, whether she liked it, how it was different or the same from the assignments the Doctor had given her. She didn’t know if the Doctor was listening but Bill was stuck with an assignment and talking it through sometimes gave her new ideas. And if the Doctor was listening, she might even help. Probably not though, probably she’d just throw a book at Bill and tell her she wasn't here to do her homework for her.

Eventually, the Doctor shifted and turned onto her back, then she started responding, and before long she had insulted all of Bill’s professors. Just like old times, really.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> writing is about wish fulfilment right? i'd kill for a look in the tardis library
> 
> i keep trying to make the doctor have conversations with people but she just. doesn't. she just doesnt do it! how am i supposed to make this resolve in any kind of satisfying way for anyone if she just ihglfgldsslkj wont say things!  
> i cant wait for next series, i wanna see what its gonna look like when she cant wiggle out of a conversation anymore. i mean one option is spyfall 2 but is there an option where she just maybe TELLS SOMEONE A THING?? i dont even care who. like it can be a random dalek she accidentally got stuck in a lift with! aaah
> 
> okay, actually, i kinda already ended this story in a pretty satisfying way but mostly for the fam and not for bill. so im writing an extra chapter to get bill the resolution she deserves as well and, i dont know how!  
> like i love 13, i love how repressed she is because i like seeing her suffer (sorry) but i also really want to see her get some kind of human connection eventually. and i can imagine how to make this happen with the fam, but with bill? how do i make 13 play nice with bill? what do i make a scene where they both get what they need out of it?  
> do you know how much 12 talked to bill? that conversation where he told bill why he wanted missy to be good, that was pretty open and vulnerable! on both their parts! but 13 is not gonna be able to do that! she's not gonna be able to come even close. not where she is right now. maybe eventually in series 13 she will and i'd love to see that but i just dont know how to make her do that now! ugh! 
> 
> siiiigh okay im back to trying to make 13 and bill talk now. got like 3 more days to figure it out before this story ends.
> 
> i hope you like this chapter


	9. hurricane

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The gang visit Villa Diodati and get more than they bargained for.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: some of Bill's cyberman ptsd/flashback, and related cyberman body horror. if you want to skip it, jump from when the doctor says 'me neither' down 7 lines and a paragraph to bill saying 'i waited'

“I was thinking Frankenstein,” the Doctor said, the next whatever-passed-for-morning-in-space, when Bill dragged herself out of unconsciousness. She was in the console room, on the floor.

“What?” she said, blearily looking around. “Did we sleep in here?”

“You did, yes,” the Doctor said, setting coordinates. The console didn’t have a big hole in it anymore, no evidence of the events of last whatever-passed-for-night-in-space. Bill sat up.

“Wait, Frankenstein?”

The Doctor grinned at her, hole in her bright-eyed façade covered up just as efficiently as the one in her console. “What do you say?”

“Thought he was fictional,” Ryan said, entering the room.

“Who?” Graham said, following.

“Frankenstein.”

Graham looked alarmed. “He’s not real, is he?”

“Not real!” the Doctor jumped in. “But his writer is. Thought we’d give her a visit. Never met Mary Shelley before.”

“Mary Shelley?” Yaz entered.

“June 1816, the Year Without a Summer, Lord Byron challenges Mary Shelley, John Polidori, and Percy Shelley to write a ghost story. Mary writes what will eventually become Frankenstein. We might need a change of clothes.”

Bill stood up.

“Can I have breakfast first?”

The Doctor looked at her like she’d never heard the word before.

“I’ll come with you, someone’s got to show you what’s edible around here,” Graham said

“What do you mean, 'what's edible'?” Bill asked as she followed Graham out of the console room.

“Yeah, you learn the hard way. Just because it’s in the kitchen doesn’t mean it’s edible. Should’ve guessed with what we’ve seen the Doc put in her mouth.”

“You mean like organ meats?”

“I mean leaves, rocks, soil–”

“Soil?”

“Eats it like candy.”

“In addition to the actual candy,” Ryan’s voice came from behind them.

Bill turned around to see Ryan and Yaz had followed them.

“Yes, that might be the only actual food she eats, ginger humbugs,” Yaz said.

“Ginger and mint? That’s a horrible combination,” Bill said.

Ryan gave her a look like ‘you dont have to tell me’.

“Isn’t the Doctor coming?”

Yaz shook her head.

“Why not?”

“We’ve stopped asking,” Graham said.

* * *

After they’d eaten, Graham, Ryan, and Yaz took Bill to the wardrobe, which had moved – or it might have been an entirely different one, it certainly didn’t look the same – to get dressed in something appropriate for 1816.

“Aren’t you going to change?” Yaz asked the Doctor when they returned to the console room.

“I’ve changed my shirt!”

Bill eyed her, remembering a suit and coat and gloves and a hat on the Thames in 1814. The Doctor looked Bill in the eyes and pulled the dematerialisation lever before she could say anything.

They landed in 1816 next to a lake, in the middle of a storm. Bill was soaked before she’d taken three steps outside the Tardis.

“I don’t see a villa yet, Doc,” Graham said.

“Must be around here somewhere,” the Doctor said, pulling up her hood. “Let’s walk this way.” She pulled the Tardis shut and headed off.

Bill was sure the lake must be very beautiful, a nice holiday spot, if she could actually see it through the rain in her eyes. They’d been walking for at least half an hour along the lake’s edge.

“How much further,” Ryan groaned.

“I’m sure we’re almost there.”

“Couldn’t you have parked a bit closer?”

“Don’t you think if I could have, I would have, Graham?” she snapped, turning around from her lonely spot walking up front. Bill caught up with her.

“Are we going to have to walk around the whole lake?”

The Doctor sighed. “I really hope not.”

Bill was already dreading the walk back.

* * *

In the end they didn’t have to walk around the entire lake. Yaz was the first to see the villa emerging through the veil of rain. Imperious from its solitary position on top of a hill.

“There! Is that it, Doctor?”

“Yes! Nice catch, Yaz!”

They hurried up the hill. Before they rang the doorbell, the Doctor turned to them.

“Listen. This is important. We can’t change anything that happens here tonight or the chain reactions through history might be disastrous. So don’t go giving anyone any ideas, don’t mention Frankenstein! And don’t interfere.”

“If it’s so dangerous, why are we here?” Ryan asked.

The Doctor put on her best wounded face. “I thought it’d be a nice day out!” She turned to the door. “Here we go.”

* * *

Of course a nice day out rarely stays that way for long when the Doctor is involved – _gets_ involved. First it’s a little bit of benign interference, then there’s a spooky scary skeleton having ambitions, and it’s only downhill from there.

Standing in that room, looking out over the lake, watching a figure blink in and out of sight, Bill had a bad feeling. When, with a flash of lightning, it materialised in the hallway, the bad feeling turned into an old, very concrete nightmare. The metallic stomping, the pneumatic hiss of joints, the rattling buzzing voice.

The Doctor slammed the door closed. There was a rush of shared panic to barricade the door.

“Doctor,” Bill grabbed the Doctor’s coat sleeve, turning her around, forcing her to look at Bill. “I did not sign up for this.”

The Doctor looked at her with wide eyes, scared, regretful, thinking thinking thinking.

“I know.”

Bill could see her mind racing. Six humans in the room, how to keep them safe, how to get them out. Cyberman in the hallway, how to figure out what he was looking for, how to prevent it from getting its hands on it. There was a franticness to her that was new to Bill. It turned her sharp.

“ _Me neither_.”

Mary cut in, “May I ask, what is a Cyberman?”

No, you may not. You may not ask.

The Doctor stared at the door. Bill guessed she wasn’t seeing the door, but something else. Something like what Bill was seeing. She smelled wet hospital floors.

“Someone altered.” The Doctor turned to Mary, eyes still far-off, unblinking. Bill didn’t want to hear this.

“Organs, flesh surgically replaced with mechanical parts without consent.” Please stop talking.

“Doctor,” she tried to say, but her voice wasn’t cooperating. Rubber hands held her down.

“It drives them insane,” cold operating table, “so they alter the brain too,” bright overhead lights, “switch off all emotion.” _This won’t stop you feeling pain, but it will stop you caring about it._

Scalpel pushed into her, she screams. _Wait for me._ Bonesaw cuts through her ribs, her lungs are taken, she doesn’t scream, she can't, she suffocates. _Wait for me._ Machinery is forced into her. Metal, rubber, foreign, wrong. It’s inside her and she can’t get away. It infringes on the edges of where she exists as a self. Advancing advancing advancing, until there’s almost no place left for her inside her own body. She collects the last vestiges of Bill Potts and retreats to a tiny safeguarded corner in her mind. There where her mother lives. The last free place. Far away from this body that they’ve corrupted, she waits for him. Waits for the Doctor.

“I waited.”

The Doctor’s eyes, startled, fell on Bill. Different face, same eyes. Bill saw through time through them.

“I waited for you.” Bill stared at those eyes in disbelief. “I waited for you and you let them do that to me.” 

Three faces snapped from Bill to the Doctor, horrified.

“What?” Yaz whispered.

The Doctor took a step toward Bill, arms outstretched, powerless, pleading.

“No, Bill–”

She turned around, hands in her hair, desperation: “I can’t–”, and swirled around again, anger: “I won’t–”.

“Doctor, what’s she talking about?” Yaz asked, voice and face full of fear.

The Doctor turned to her, mouth open to say something but no words available, caught between emotions, people, lifetimes. Nobody moved, nobody breathed, time had frozen. Then something crashed in the hallway behind the door and took time with it. Movement, voices, someone took Bill’s hand and guided her to a chair. Their hand was soft and smooth against hers. Her hands were trembling. Trembling and not made of rubber. Her legs were shaking. Her heart was pounding. Her flesh-not-rubber hands shot to her chest. Flat, smooth. No bulky metal unit keeping her alive, but a heart, a real living human heart. Bill looked up, around. Graham sat crouched next to her, worried. The Doctor was pacing, addressing the room, thinking out loud.

“He’s alone, but he’s looking for something. I need to beat him to it.”

She moved to the door. Bill saw her hand shake as she reached for the doorknob.

“What are you doing? Where are you going?” Yaz asked.

“You’re not leaving us.”

“I have to find out what he’s looking for.” Her eyes briefly flicked to Bill, and back to Yaz. “Alone.”

Wanted to go back into a cyberwarzone on her own. Wanted to confront a Cyberman on her own. Was going to leave Bill behind to do it. No, Bill wasn’t letting that happen. She didn’t _want_ to face a Cyberman, but if she was going to have to, she wasn’t doing it alone. They were doing this together.

“You need backup! All of us against one.”

Right. Bill struggled out of the chair.

“One Cyberman, but then thousands. Humans like all of you. Changed into empty soulless shells. No feeling, no control, no way back. I will not lose anyone else to that!”

“You’re not going to.” Her voice sounded strange but it wasn’t buzzing out of a speaker. She was alive. She was human. “He’s alone, he’s looking for something,” Bill echoed the Doctor’s words. “He’s not here to convert an entire city. The worst he can do is kill us.” A slight squeak of alarm from Graham beside her. The Doctor was about to protest, but Yaz stepped forward.

“Whatever he’s looking for, we can find it first. All of us together.”

Graham went to stand beside her. “It wasn’t an empty threat, Doc. We meant it when we said whether you like it or not."

"We’re with you," Ryan said.

The Doctor looked distinctly unhappy about it but, four against one, she had to admit defeat. She turned to Claire, Mary, and Byron.

“Stay here. I mean it. Don’t get yourselves killed.”

She turned to Bill, Ryan, Yaz, and Graham. “Come on.”

* * *

They found Percy in the cellar. His description of a cyberwar-torn universe made Bill go cold. The Cybermen might have won last time but not this time. She wasn’t going to let this happen.

Percy was desperate, afraid. “I can’t keep him away much longer.”

A rapid-fire argument broke out that had Bill scrambling for context again.

“One death, one ripple, and history will change in a blink. The future will not be the world you know. The world you came from, the world you were created in won't exist, so neither will you. It's not just his life at stake. It's yours. You want to sacrifice yourself for this? You want me to sacrifice you? You want to call it? Do it now. All of you.”

Bill was stunned. So were the others. This wasn't fair.

“Yeah." She looked _so_ angry. "Sometimes this team structure isn't flat. It's mountainous, with me at the summit, in the stratosphere, alone. Left to choose. Save the poet, save the universe. Watch people burn now or tomorrow. Sometimes, even I can't win.”

Bill looked around at the others, stunned into silence, was anyone going to slap her or was she going to have to do it?

“You’ve changed your tune.” She stepped forward and crossed her arms, presenting a front way more sure than the mess of fear and confusion swirling inside her was making her feel. _Have you ever killed anyone?_ She swallowed the thought and opened her mouth. “What happened to ‘I serve at the pleasure of the human race’?”

“That’s what I’m doing,” the Doctor hissed.

“Oh my god really? You think guilttripping your friends into an impossible decision is serving the human race?”

“To save your future, to save _you._ ” Her eyes bore into Bill. Furious.

“You can’t do this.”

“I can. I’m going to.”

Bill was unflappable. “It isn’t up to you.”

The Doctor physically recoiled at that. Looked almost more appalled than when Ryan had made the suggestion. Looked almost betrayed. “You want to let him die too?” Her voice was rough, full of disbelief.

“Absolutely not,” Bill said, eliciting a hopeful whimper from Mary, “but as far as I can tell, we,” she gestured at herself, the speechless trio beside her, Mary and Percy on the floor, “we’re the human race in this situation. Our people, our planet. You serve at our pleasure, Doctor.”

The Doctor took a step back, dumbfounded, instinctively creating distance between herself and Bill, herself and memories, herself from the past. She stared at Bill, at Yaz, Ryan, and Graham, at Percy on the floor. And then Bill saw some gears behind her eyes that had been stuck a for a while, slowly creak into motion again. She stared at Bill. And then nodded slowly.

“Right, okay, uh,” she swirled around, trying to regroup. She turned back to Bill. Eyes intent, but lost, still that franticness fizzing beneath the surface. “Tell me what to do then.”

Bill nodded to Percy. “Save him.”

“I don’t know how! I don’t know how to get the Cyberium out of him! The Cyberman knows!”

“We’re not letting the Cyberman have it,” Yaz said.

“Then what do you propose?” the Doctor snapped.

“What do we know about this Cyberium?” Bill asked.

The Doctor swirled, dragging her hands through her hair.

“Uhh, contains all cyber knowledge, controlling strategy, decision-making–”

“ _How_ does it do that?”

“Fuses to a cerebral cortex, gives the host the data and processing power to make the necessary decisions–”

“Why doesn’t it just do it by itself?” Yaz asked.

The Doctor stopped in her tracks, staring at Yaz, revelation. “It needs a host!” they said simultaneously.

“It’s like a virus?” Yaz asked.

The Doctor’s mouth fell open. “Yes! Of _course_! I said it!” She turned to Bill, “Didn’t I say it Bill? _They go viral._ ” She turned to face all four of them, mind racing almost too fast for her tongue to keep up with, “Cybermen, they’re not a race, a species, so much as an idea, they can’t exist on their own, they need hosts to replicate, to reproduce, both materially – they need bodies – and ideologically, they need to spread the _idea_ of them. The heart of the Cybermen, their central point, it attaches itself to a host, spreads its data through them.”

“What Percy wrote on the walls!” Yaz said.

“Yes! He’s reproducing the data the Cyberium wants him to reproduce!”

“So how do you kill a virus?” Ryan asked.

“Wash your hands?” Graham suggested.

“Yeah, don’t think that’s going to cut it,” Bill said.

The Doctor had gone still. “Kill the host,” she said quietly.

Okay, alarming. Bill moved between her and Percy. “Uhh no. That’s what we’re trying not to do?”

“This might work,” the Doctor pushed past her gently.

“Doctor!” Yaz moved to stand up, but the Doctor held up a hand and shushed her.

The Doctor put a hand to Percy’s head and Percy stared death in the face. Then a blinding light lit up his face from the inside, followed by a metallic floating liquid substance worming itself out from between his lips. The house shifted, like loose sand through cupped hands. Percy dropped, the defenses dropped, the Cyberman appeared. Bill found herself next to Claire.

“Shelley needs help, I think I’ve freed him from the Cyberium.”

Yaz dropped next to him, ready to be of service. Just past her, behind the Cyberman, was a fireplace. With a fire iron.

The Doctor reached for the Cyberium, manic glint in her eyes that made Bill fear the fate of the universe for a split-second. It was like something lying hidden and dormant deep within the Doctor was coming out to play. Cold and hollow and insatiable. Bill moved toward the fireplace.

The Cyberman put out his hand and the house shook.

“What are you doing?”

“Transmitting. My ship will lock onto my signal, it will tear this reality, this planet will remain only in shreds.”

“The world doesn’t end in 1816. It can’t.”

“It will.”

“He’s bluffing,” Yaz said from the floor beside Percy. Bill wasn’t so sure. She reached for the fire iron.

“But I can’t be sure. I can’t risk this planet. I can’t win!”

“We are inevitable.”

Like hell you are. Bill swung the fire iron, it clanged against the Cyberman’s head. He turned around. She pulled back and, with everything she had, pushed the fire iron straight through his unprotected eye. Die, wretched demon! She didn't know if it’d be enough to kill him but at least it put them in the lead again. Its head leaked fluid and rotting goo that might have once been brain. The Doctor jumped on him, sonicking, intercepting his transmission. The sky cleared up. Percy gasped. Bill stumbled and sagged against the wall. The Doctor looked up at her in shock.

“Bill! What did you do?”

Bill shrugged, trying to affect casual coolness but being undermined by her knees inability to do their jobs.

“I thought not letting it have what it wants was the plan.”

The Doctor stared at her. Bill saw silvery fragments flitting like worms underneath her skin.

“Good– good call,” Ryan breathed.

“The Cyberium is still in you,” Yaz said. The Doctor looked at her and nodded breathlessly. “Is it going to kill you?”

She shook her head. “No... No, I don’t think so. At least not as quickly.” She stood up and extended a hand to help Bill stand up.

“What are we going to do about that?” Graham asked.

“Find another host. One it won’t be able to leave.”

“Like the Morris worm,” Ryan said.

“The what?” Graham said.

“One of the first computer worms, they put it on a floppy disk.”

“Exactly!” The Doctor grinned, slightly sharp and tinged silver. “We need a floppy disk.”

“What, a simple floppy disk is gonna hold an AI containing all cyber knowledge?” Graham said incredulously.

“Metaphorical floppy disk. I think I have an idea.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so i've got two small things to say but then i wrote a whole entire tedtalk about this scene in villa diodati so im putting that at the end here for whoever's interested
> 
> first small thing: 'die wretched demon' is a little nod to how graham quoted the wrong writer at the start of 12x8, because that's like how the monster is referred to in frankenstein? at least as demon and wretched im pretty sure. not sure if ever together but whatever. bill probably interfered a little bit because mary shelley was there to hear that but come on, it's not like they hadnt already made a complete mess of the timeline at that point. and at least bill got the writer right.
> 
> second small thing: the bit about how the cyberium worked was mostly inspired by this https://archiveofourown.org/works/22665379 amazing fic. this whole series is great. it's doctor/master texting fic and it has so much meta and cool timelord lore and things.
> 
> okay that's it, here comes the tedtalk:  
> So, the obvious parallel scene i was thinking about (and watching) while writing this was of course the one in Thin Ice where the Doctor is like 'bill give me an order'. Because, while that's a really heavy responsibility to put on someone, i think the doctor was kind there. (she’s NOT kind in villa diodati)
> 
> He was asking Bill, very explicitly, to fulfill the companion role that companions tend to take on themselves. The role that the Doctor needs them for. That's what the whole 'dont travel alone' thing is about right? If the doctor travels alone, they have no one to force them to find the third option that’s better than either the rock or the hard place, no one to hold them back when they get angry. 
> 
> And it's super fascinating because at first glance 13 isn't alone. She has 3 companions, which is more than the Doctor has had in a while and she keeps the fam so close she can barely stand to be left alone for a single day in 12x7, but that's all just surface! superficially she’s not alone but actually she’s super alone. i dont think the fam really realises Who she is. like during series 11 she’s basically hiding her entire time lord self right? everything timelord about her, she’s hiding, diminishing. she doesnt refer to her past except for silly little anecdotes, she doesnt say words like timelord, gallifrey, doesnt even explain what the letters in tardis stand for! i mean they know about regeneration but look at spyfall 2, that conversation the fam has while they’re on the run. she’s never explained to them what regeneration actually is except for that first night.  
> they never meet any aliens that know about either her or gallifreys/the timelords reputation. throughout series 11 she’s basically presenting herself as your friendly neighbourhood alien.
> 
> So, what i was thinking about in this rewrite of the monologue scene in Villa Diodati was obviously Thin Ice but also i was thinking about that scene at the end of Kill the Moon. (that’s what Bill’s line ‘oh my god really?’ was a nod to. Clara says this in the confrontation scene at the end of Kill the Moon)
> 
> It’s really really interesting to put the scene at the end of Kill the Moon, next to the scene in Thin ice, next to the scene in Villa Diodati.  
> (i made this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26Sxt3NXbCI with the purpose of comparing those scenes but it kinda got out of hand when i put the gallifrey theme right underneath the doctor’s speech in villa diodati and then it suddenly sounded like she was talking about the timeless child and i got to theorising how maybe, maybe the doctor next series will have to make a choice between the timeless child/herself and all of gallifrey? like “The future will not be the world you know. The world you came from, the world you were created in won't exist, so neither will you.” is she going to have to choose between like saving someone and undoing all of gallifrey’s entire history retroactively? I DONT KNOW. that wasnt the point of this. back to the point)
> 
> Because if you put Kill the Moon next to Thin Ice next to Villa Diodati this is what you get:  
> 1\. Kill the Moon; the Doctor makes Clara and Various Incidental Companions choose between killing the moon and not killing it.  
> He lays out the situation for them pretty clearly. Kill the moon, which is a baby in an egg, and earth will be safe. 
> 
> the rest didn't fit, so i put it on tumblr if anyone's interested: https://you-have-to-use-your-imagination.tumblr.com/post/622374042304987136/comparing-kill-the-moon-thin-ice-and-villa


	10. request

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Doctor, can I make a request?"

Yaz sat on the edge of the low platform the console stood on, leaning against a pillar, the dim blue and pale orange light of the walls reflecting how she felt. The walk back from Villa Diodati to the Tardis hadn’t been nearly as bad as the walk there. Still high on their win over the ominous Lone Cyberman that had been hanging over them for weeks, sun in their faces, view of the lake, the world hadn’t looked that dark. They’d joked and laughed. Yaz had picked flowers to make a flower crown. Bill had joined in. The Doctor looked happy, if a little bit silver, but they fixed that easily enough when they were back in the Tardis. It was almost like old times.

But it wasn’t like old times, because Yaz couldn’t stop thinking about the Doctor’s words to the Cyberman. ‘I can’t risk this planet.’ I can’t risk this planet. Planet, planet, _this_ planet. Can’t risk it, _I_ can’t risk it. And her speech. Reproachful, she’d been, almost resentful. Of what? The responsibility? That had been put on her? Or that she had taken on? Of having to choose between a planet and the universe? Earth and the universe. Their home and the universe.

Images of Orphan 55 had rudely intruded on Yaz’s mind during the walk. As she looked out over the lake, glittering, brilliant, full of life, her brain provided the view of an endless expanse of grey dust. The blue sky replaced by toxic fog. The flowers in her hands, yellow buttercups and blue forget-me-nots, vivid and vibrant and viscerally, painfully alive. Their inevitable loss already tangible in her present enjoyment of them.

So Yaz sat on the low platform where the console stood – flower crown in her lap matching the colours of the Tardis around her – tracing her finger over the messy remnants of symbols on the side of the platform. There used to be a design here. Since they’d first stepped foot in the Tardis on Desolation, there had been a design here. It hadn’t taken Yaz long to notice that the symbols on the platform were the same kind as the ones on the Tardis displays. Some sort of writing then. Alien language, she thought, probably the Doctor’s own. But it could also just be something that the Doctor had run into somewhere, sometime, and liked enough to keep around.

There was a lot of that in the Tardis. Beautiful and utterly bewildering alien things around every corner. Yaz had liked to wander the endless hallways and corridors, see where she’d end up. She’d never accidentally set foot in the same room twice, the Tardis always led her somewhere new. Not everywhere was beautiful, there were scary places, but whether enchanting or unnerving, every room had this captivating alien aspect to it. Even her own bedroom, while looking very similar to her one at home – Earth home – still felt alien. Sometimes she’d find little alien things in it that she hadn’t put there. A book she couldn’t read on her bed (she had spent hours looking at the illustrations but never figured out what it was about), an alien plant on her bedside table with the most incredible flowers in all colours of the rainbow that smelled like nothing she had ever smelled. She’d asked the Doctor what it was called later. Yaz couldn’t pronounce the name.

She never knew whether it was the Doctor who put these things in her room or the Tardis. Or both. For many places in the Tardis she thought it was both. She’d found gardens filled with only alien plants. Rooms like caves and rooms that went on so high she couldn’t see the ceiling. A spiral staircase she had set out to walk all the way to the top but eventually had to admit defeat to when she’d been found by the others, having been missing for almost an entire day.

Lately she hadn’t been wandering so much anymore. Lately she seemed to end up in more scary rooms than nice ones. Rooms furnished entirely in oppressive red and orange tones. Large open halls with balconies all around that reminded her vaguely of Roman amphitheatres. Long galleries filled with what looked like costumes in glass cases. Some looked almost like soldier uniforms, like they show in war museums. Others reminded her more of the formal solemnity of judge’s robes. There were headdresses too, presented in glass cases on mannequin-like heads without any recognisable facial features. All of it in shades of red and gold. She hadn’t stayed long there. Wherever she went, she kept opening doors to rooms filled with only red sand. Nothing in them. Sometimes she smelled burning but she could never pinpoint the source.

So now she just sat in the console room, tracing the scrubbed away remainders of something beautiful with her finger.

Soft footsteps of the Doctor entering the room. She had taken her shoes off. Yaz got ready to get up. If it was night and the lights were all blue and the Doctor came in the console room, they’d long since learnt, they’d better leave her alone.

But the Doctor didn’t go straight to the console to do whatever she did all night – looking for the Master probably – she walked in Yaz’s direction, quietly sitting down on the edge of the platform, leaning against the pillar next to the one Yaz was sat against, keeping enough distance between the two of them.

Yaz looked at her, surprised. The Doctor sitting down, still, with only one other person in the room? Careful Doctor, you might give someone the idea you want to have a conversation. She caught Yaz’s eye and smiled, it was soft and sad. Yaz’s heart ached. She smiled back and then looked down at her fingers, still tracing.

The Doctor coming to sit with her, it felt like permission. Permission to ask. Invitation even. Or request.

Yaz glanced at her. She looked small, without her coat on, without her shoes. She was looking at the invisible patterns Yaz was tracing. Permission. Request.

“There used to be a design here,” Yaz said, speaking softly, compelled by that strange thing that hang in the air in private, delicate moments.

“Hmhm, yeah,” the Doctor hummed. Her voice was soft, gentle, jagged. Not breakable but broken, a while ago. Sharp edges mostly sanded off. She started tracing her fingers over the scrubbed off shapes too. Plea more than request.

Yaz exhaled slowly. She wanted to cry. For what she didn’t know. For everything, maybe.

“It was really pretty,” she said.

The Doctor nodded many times, small nods, to herself, like when something is just true and it expresses itself through your head, instead of you trying to communicate something to someone. Yaz nodded too. They sat in silence for a while. The drone of the Tardis like their blood, its whirring like their breathing, unsynchronised, the Doctor’s alien biology against Yaz’s human one. Yaz felt her pulse in her stomach, in her spine, in her throat, in her head. She didn’t want to ask the obvious question, but she couldn’t think of anything else. _Why did you remove it?_ She already knew the answer and she was afraid to hear it. Spoken. Made real. The flowers in her lap were wilting.

She shifted, pulling her feet up on the platform, sitting sideways so she was fully facing the Doctor sitting against the other pillar.

“Does the Tardis choose the decorations?” the Doctor stopped tracing and looked at her, turning towards Yaz slightly. Her eyes were weary and ancient and her face was sad and lost. _What did she have to say to someone that old? Why would the Doctor listen to Yaz?_ Yaz felt like she was seeing her own thoughts echoed in the Doctor’s eyes. _Why would these humans spend their time on me. Eternal but inconstant. Not part of anything, any family, any history. Part of your life for a little while and then gone again. More defined by legacy than actuality. More defined by absence than presence._

“Mmm yes,” the Doctor cleared her throat, finding a bit more of her voice back. “Yes, she does. I told you I lost her?”

She sounded genuinely unsure. So many lies by omission, so many secrets, so much hiding.

Yaz nodded. “Yeah, you did.”

“She threw me out.” The Doctor looked down, a small fond smile playing at the corners of her mouth. “I’m, I’m uh, I’m a handful.” She smiled at Yaz a little timidly. A vibration went through the Tardis all around them. A purr, low and deep. Yaz felt it in her entire body. She was suddenly hyperaware that they were surrounded by – sitting inside – this immense incomprehensible being. The Tardis could kill them in a thousand ways at once if it wanted to. Yaz felt enormously loved.

She smiled at the Doctor, feeling the outlines of her old frustration but instead of bitterness, they were coloured in with tenderness, a lot of love. “I know.”

The Doctor looked at her with something that was trying to be a smile. Grateful and sad. Afraid to hope.

“And then she made this.” The Doctor put a hand on the golden crystal, leaned her head against it, and looked up into the Tardis ceiling. Yaz watched her, watched them.

“She likes to do renovations when I do.”

Yaz frowned a little, not understanding. The Doctor gestured at herself.

“Renovation.”

“Ah,” Yaz nodded, “so she’s done this a lot too then?” She looked around the console room.

“Yes, she has. Old girl. This is, this is a bit different than usual though. The shapes,” she pointed at the wall, Yaz turned her head to look. “the shapes are usually there. Tend to be a bit more round though.”

“Bill called it a kitchen.”

The Doctor made a little huff of air like a laugh.

“There used to be more metal, yeah.”

She pulled her knees to her chest and laughed softly. “Do you know what she said, first time I took her in here, she said, well, the kitchen remark, and then she said ‘what happened to the doors, did you run out of money?’”

Yaz doubled over, giggling. Her body felt loose and strange, giddy. They laughed together for a while. Nothing existed and everything was okay.

Eventually they caught their breath and settled back into the quiet. The Doctor’s hand had moved back to the side of the platform. Invitation, request, plea.

They sat facing each other now. Yaz could just look at her, didn’t have to sneak glances. The Doctor sat, quiet and still, facing her. Giving Yaz permission, invitation, to just look. She didn’t move, she didn’t squirm. Didn’t hide or obfuscate or deflect. Just let her hand trace the invisible shapes. It was precise. She knew the shapes without having to see them. She was fingerpainting invisible words in her native language back onto her Tardis. Short-lived, no trace of her writing remained once her finger had moved past. Ephemeral. Calling something back into existence that would not persist for longer than a heartbeat. Invitation, request, plea.

Yaz didn’t know how. Her throat was thick. She had to try twice before she found her voice again. She would break the words if she wasn’t careful.

A whisper. So delicate. “What does it say, Doctor?”

She blinked and a tear made its way down her face. The Doctor didn’t look up but smiled. The amount of tender sadness in her face was going to drown Yaz. She still didn’t look at Yaz when she started gently reciting.

Yaz didn’t notice when the tears started streaming down her face, or when her vision turned so blurry she couldn’t see anything but swirling shapes of blue and orange, or when she curled in on herself, arms around her knees, and started sobbing.

She thought of home, of family. Family in Sheffield, family in the Tardis. She thought of Earth, the human race, everything that lay at the foundation of how she defined herself. Everything she had never thought about because she couldn’t imagine it not being there. The backdrop of her existence.

_Can we visit? Your home?_

_Another time._

She thought of Orphan 55, of dregs, of everyone she’d ever known, everyone she hadn’t known, dead.

_When you did you know?_

_Just before you did._

She thought of being zapped to another dimension, of sitting beside a road, of being alone. Not knowing whether she was still alive, whether she wanted to be. Not knowing where to go. No one coming to save her, because there was no one left. Alone in the dark.

She thought of the Doctor, spending countless sleepless nights, searching an endless empty universe for a sign of life, a sign of home.

_I thought he’d be the last person you’d wanna see._

He was.

She never figured out if she had moved to the Doctor’s side, or the Doctor to her. She just remembered sitting together, warm and solid against each other. The Doctor’s double heartbeats playing against her single one, telling them: We are here, we are here, we are here, we are here.

They were here, present and alive. Stable ground underneath all the running and adrenaline and excitement and death. Underneath all the loss.

There was nothing they could do but be here and be alive.

They were here and they were alive.

They weren’t dead yet.

They weren’t dead yet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> maybe im just gay but this is my favourite chapter of this story.
> 
> turns out i really like describing the tardis? i really liked bill in the library in the other chapter, just imagining the books that would be there! and i liked imagining the sort of wonders and alien things yaz could have walked into in this chapter. i dont know, there's just so much possibility you know? it's magical
> 
> some fun symbolic meanings of buttercups: new beginnings, friendship, optimism, renewal  
> some fun symbolic meanings of forget-me-nots: loyalty in a relationship despite challenges, reminder of your favourite memories/good times you had with another person, a connection that lasts through time
> 
> this whole chapter was inspired by the fact that i noticed that in series 11 if you look at wide shots of the tardis console room, there's gallifreyan writing on the side of that little platform the console stands on. and in series 12 it's gone and it looks a little bit like i dont know, streaks of soap when you're washing the windows you know? or dripping paint. and yeah technically it's already gone in 12x1 before the doctor sees gallifrey and yeah also technically that design is probably made of like some material like plastic or wood or whatever and not something you could scrub away but it's just way more angsty to imagine the doctor after she finds gallifrey to just sit there scrubbing the writing off the platform. so that's what i imagine/imply happened.
> 
> at first i was planning on writing something but for a while i just had [write something here] when the doctor started reciting what was there and i just won't be able to write something that is beautiful and moving enough. it works better this way i think. i imagine it was a gallifreyan saying or short poem or something about home. like home sweet home but more deeply culturally resonant.
> 
> the bit where we kinda get to hear the doctor's thoughts, or yaz gets to hear them, because like, i cant exactly write the doctor's thoughts because we're in yaz's pov but i imagine it's the doctor being like psychically leaky? (yes let me just explain my thought process for every bit of this chapter why not. if you read it you probably already got it or else i failed in my writing but i want to talk about it so im gonna) like here i imagine the doctor is just leaking her thoughts all over the place and yaz picks it up because it's reverse mindreading. she's accidentally pushing her thoughts onto yaz. this was also, i think i got that across, but this also happened in chapter 5 where yaz felt like she was dying. like the doctor was just drowning in all their companions who've died or got hurt PLUS the entirety of gallifrey being dead again and so all the death-feelings got dumped onto yaz and the others.
> 
> first when i wrote the line from orphan 55 in here about 'when did you know' i actually misremembered it because i had forgotten that yaz says 'when did you know? that it was earth'. i watched it later and realised she specified earth, but actually if you leave the second bit of that line out, it's suddenly like wow. because then it sounds like the doctor is talking about gallifrey and like she's saying she found her dead planet just before they did. because she finds gallifrey at the end of 12x2 and orphan 55 is 12x3 so that was probably intentional but i just hadn't caught that before. 
> 
> okay im done rambling now
> 
> let me know what you thought of this chapter! if you want to. im not the boss of you


	11. homecoming

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A resolution, of sorts.

In the end they realised it wasn’t them who didn’t know the words to the questions they wanted to ask, it was the Doctor who didn’t know the words to the answers.

So they forewent the words. And the questions. And the answers.

* * *

She started by showing them how the Tardis worked. Showing Yaz around the console like she had Bill. Explaining the mechanisms, how it moved through space, how it moved through time. What the motors did and how, how you made it go where you wanted it to go. (“You don’t. We’re at her mercy.” The Doctor smiled. “What we can do, is be really nice to her and maybe she’ll give us our way once in a while.”) She showed them what all the components did, disabling them and showing them what happened to the Tardis if she did that.

(“Can you please not do that Doc! My bruises have bruises!”

“How else are you going to know what the artificial gravity generator does?”

“I think we could have guessed from the name!”

“You know, I still don’t really get what the custard cream dispenser does.”

“You know what, I don’t think I do either Ryan, let’s test it again.”)

When the hands-on demonstration wasn’t enough, she removed the components from the Tardis to disassemble them and explain how they worked. Most of it went over Yaz’s head, and Graham was worried they’d get stuck on another planet because the Doctor had forgotten to reassemble the relativity differentiator or the orthogenal engine filters or some other thing but Ryan took to it like a fish to water.

She let him press all the buttons, installed some new ones too. (“You can never have enough buttons. I used to have a lot of buttons. Wonder where I put them.”)

Bill watched it all from the stairs.

When it was time to go home, they flew the Tardis together, all five of them under the Doctor’s instruction. It went miraculously well. They got Bill home safe, no accidents. Well, except for bumping into the 1980’s, but it was barely a scratch, nobody’ll notice.

* * *

It was a couple of weeks after that that she took them through some of the rooms Yaz had seen. Didn’t say anything, just took their hands and led them into the amphitheatre-like room, let them wander around, draw the curtains, sit on seats. She silently watched them. They didn’t know what they were doing, but they were happy to do it for her. When they left, the room felt as if time had started moving in it again. The Doctor closed the door behind them.

She walked them through the gallery with costumes. Pulling them forward in some parts, letting go of their hands and wavering in others.

Ryan asked if he could try a costume on. He could. Their laughter broke a bit of the spell.

* * *

In still moments between adventures, she started telling them stories. Legend, myth, fairytale, history. They couldn’t tell which was which and it didn’t matter. What mattered was that they were stories, that she wanted to tell them. So they took them carefully and kept them safe.

* * *

Sometimes, showing them around a new alien planet, she would suddenly say: “These leaves are just like on Gallifrey.”

That’s what she would say. Just like on Gallifrey. She would say that a lot. Or no, not a lot. But it felt like a lot. There’d be something in the air that made them pause, hold their breath, wait. Leaning forward on a precipice, the moment between standing and falling.

She was trying to say it more often than she said it.

* * *

One day, eventually, sitting in the living room with a window, watching two parts of a binary planet slowly fall into each other, she came in with a heavy red book. Asked if she could read to them. They wordlessly made space for her between them on the couch. Moving to the side, making sure not to touch her unless she initiated. She pulled her legs under her, pillow on her lap, put the book on it. Paused. Looked at them a little nervously.

“You won’t understand it.”

They nodded. “That’s okay.”

She took a breath, steadied herself.

She read them a long poem. They could tell it was a poem because it rhymed. They couldn’t tell how they knew it rhymed. It rhymed in ways they hadn’t imagined possible. In ways they couldn’t put into words. It was cyclical, some parts felt like they went backwards, rhyming in a way beyond the words, beyond the sounds. Rhyming in space, rhyming through time.

When it was finished, nobody said anything, then she said: “Thank you.”

“What is it about?” Ryan asked.

The Doctor took a deep breath. “A beatitude – it’s, it’s an animal. On–” Pause. Precipice. “–Gallifrey. It’s born into a nest of beatitudes but it realises it’s not like the others, it’s different. It has a different colour, it behaves in a different way, it doesn’t like nectar. It leaves home, looking for someone like it.

It flies further and for longer than any animal has ever gone. It makes friends along the way but always leaves them behind. Driven to go on. To find the place where it belongs. Until flying is all it does, what it becomes, who it is.”

“Like a traveller,” Graham said. The Doctor didn’t meet their eye.

“Does it find it? Where it belongs?” Ryan asked.

The Doctor shook her head. “No, it’s still looking.”

“It’s still looking?” Yaz said, “That’s so sad.”

The Doctor looked her in the eye and smiled. “It’s still looking. That’s beautiful.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oops i forgot to post a chapter yesterday? sorry
> 
> this is really short because originally this was the last chapter but then i realised i hadnt given bill a proper ending so i wrote an epilogue.  
> so this one is really short and the next one is really long


	12. nostalgia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Epilogue.
> 
> nostalgia (n.)  
> From Greek algos "pain, grief, distress" (see -algia) + nostos "homecoming," from neomai "to reach some place, escape, return, get home," from PIE *nes- "to return safely home" (cognate with Old Norse nest "food for a journey," Sanskrit nasate "approaches, joins," German genesen "to recover," Gothic ganisan "to heal," Old English genesen "to recover").

A Saturday, a couple of weeks after Bill had been dropped back home by the Doctor and the gang, she half-woke around 8 am to the whooshing of the Tardis. Her brain had played this trick on her before, she wasn’t going to fall for it and be weirdo running through the street in her pyjamas again. She turned over and was almost back asleep when Heather nudged her.

“Bill.”

“What,” she groaned into her pillow.

“You’ve got a visitor.”

The Tardis door creaked open.

“What are you two still doing in bed?”

Bill sat up with a start. Ready to shoo the Doctor out of her bedroom or jump into the Tardis. She’d be able to tell you which after she’d done it.

“Doctor! We have a rule about the bedroom!”

The Doctor stepped aside to allow Bill a line of sight into the Tardis and said, with the exact tone and facial expression of a child who was being blamed for something they didn’t do: “I don’t have the Pope with me!”

Bill saw Yaz, Ryan, and Graham look at each other in confused amusement at what kind of story must have been behind that sentence. The Doctor jumped out of the Tardis and darted around the bedroom, picking up a bottle of perfume from the dresser and, looking half curious, half confused, like she’d forgotten which sense perfume was intended for, spraying it into her mouth

“I’m not sure you’ve really grasped my main issue with the Pope incident–” Bill muttered.

The Doctor stuck out her tongue in disgust and put the perfume bottle down. “Ready to go?”

“No!” Bill said, and then, despite herself, “Go where?” She glanced at Heather, who was watching with an impassive sort of amusement.

“Up to you! I made a list.”

Okay, yeah, who was she trying to fool. Bill threw off the covers. “I’m not dressed.”

The Doctor flipped through a book she’d found on the nightstand, waving a hand dismissively. “Who cares?”

“I do! Come back in half an hour?”

The Doctor grinned at her and bounced back to the Tardis. “Yes! Back in a sec!” The Tardis door slammed with a rattle. Bill caught Heather’s eye.

“What are you grinning at?”

“You. Come here.” She pulled Bill across the bed to kiss her. Bill looked at her when they broke apart, searching her face.

“You really don’t mind?”

“Noooooo,” Heather let herself drop back on the pillow. “God no. Go have fun. I’m going back to sleep.”

Bill groaned. “Next time I’m asking if she can come at 12.”

“Next time, hm?” Heather mumbled, eyes closing. Bill turned to busy herself in her closet. “Thought you didn’t need that life anymore,” Heather said around a self-satisfied grin. Bill didn’t respond. Okay, yes, she had said in multiple conversations over the past few years that she didn’t want to go travelling with the Doctor anymore, if he ever showed up again. And she hadn’t been lying! She might have been wrong though. Who could resist the call of adventure when it landed right in your bedroom? Not Bill. Sue her.

* * *

Twenty minutes later, Bill sat in the living room buzzing with excitement when she heard the Tardis materialise. She almost tripped over the coffee table as she sprinted to the bedroom.

“Not in the bedroom!”  
She opened the bedroom door at the same time as the Doctor the Tardis door. Bill rushed to push her back inside.

“You’ll wake Heather!

“Bill?” Heather mumbled.

Bill went over to kiss her goodbye. “Sorry, I’m off, see you tonight, love you, bye.”

* * *

“I can be back by tonight, right?” she asked, closing the Tardis door behind her.

The Doctor stood by the console, showing the gang a collection of planets on a display on the wall. She looked up at Bill. “Of course!”

Graham grimaced at Bill. “Wouldn’t count on it,” he whispered.

Bill grinned and joined them around the console. “So where are we going?”

Ryan pointed at the display. “The options.”

A collection of dots in different colours spread out over the screen, labelled with circular writing that didn’t tell Bill anything.

“What about that one?” Graham pointed at a blue dot.

“Yes, that’s a very good option.”

“Really?” Graham said, looking pleasantly surprised that the Doctor had agreed with him.

“If you’re trying to commit suicide by boredom, yes, very.”

Graham let out a sigh of the long-suffering.

“The orange and red ones have a bit more excitement.”

“Does excitement mean ‘likely to kill us’ because I’m veto-ing anything that will end with us dead.”

The Doctor looked at him like he’d said they could go to the amusement park but they couldn’t go on any of the rides.

“Well, that’s half my list gone then,” she muttered, pressing a button that made most of the red dots disappear.

Bill saw Graham mouth ‘half the list?’ at Ryan. She caught Yaz’s eye who looked just as excited as she felt.

* * *

After an adventure in which the Doctor let Yaz put the coordinates into the Tardis, let Bill pull the dematerialisation lever, let Ryan use the sonic – and nobody died! Graham! – Bill came into the console room with a cup of tea to find Yaz sitting on the stairs watching the Doctor yell instructions to Ryan who was somewhere in the bowels of the Tardis underneath the console.

Bill walked over to the stairs and Yaz shifted to make space for her, looking enviously at her cup of tea. Bill offered her her biscuit. They watched the Doctor and Ryan work on the Tardis in crunching, sipping silence for a few minutes.

“So, the Doctor seems...” Bill considered, “different?” That seemed diplomatic enough.

Yaz snorted but her voice was soft when she said, “She is.”

Bill shifted, turning to Yaz. “Can you like, explain? Because I feel like I’m missing a whole lot of context.”

Yaz made an apologetic face that Bill interpreted as ‘you are’ and said, “You should ask her.”

Bill scoffed. “The Doctor? She’s allergic to questions.”

Yaz winced. “I know, but–” she glanced at the Doctor, working with Ryan in a way that seemed almost playful. “I think she might tell you now.”

Bill raised her eyebrows. “Why would she do that?”

“She told us.”

“Told you what?”

“Ask her!”

“Can’t you just tell me?”

“It isn’t my place.”

Bill looked at Yaz for a moment, biting her lip. Then she nodded. “Okay.” And took another sip of tea.

She leaned back on the stairs, watching the Doctor and watching Yaz watch the Doctor with glittering eyes and a faint soft smile that Bill wasn’t sure Yaz herself was even aware of. 

“You know,” Bill cleared her throat, “when the Doctor was gone, when I thought he’d died, I said to Nardole if I saw him again, I’d kiss him, if he weren’t a man.”

Yaz’s face snapped to her, wide-eyed.

“‘Snog his face off’ might have been the words I used.”

Yaz stared at her like she was trying to figure out what the hell Bill was trying to say, but blushing like she already knew.

Bill tried not to grin too obviously and looked back at the Doctor, tripping over the toolbox she had lying open on the floor.

“But honestly, I still just see my old professor. I mean, she’s different, but she’s not _that_ different”

Yaz looked skeptical.

“She already has the flappy coat,” Bill said, “so just imagine sunglasses and a guitar and you’ve got the idea.”

“Guitar?”

“ _Electric_ guitar.” Bill smirked, pretending not to see Yaz’s mouth fall open. “Hey Doctor,” she said, raising her voice.

The Doctor startled and dropped a handful of screws down the hole in the Tardis through which Ryan had climbed in. He yelped and and the sound of the screws bouncing of metal on the way down echoed through the console room.

“Sorry!” the Doctor yelled down.

“What was that for?” Ryan yelled up.

Bill put her empty tea cup on the stairs next to her. “Where’s your guitar?”

The Doctor frowned at the unexpected question and then in thought when she’d processed it. She looked around the console room like it might just be lying around there somewhere. It wasn’t.

“I don’t know. Might have got lost in the reconfiguration. The Tardis probably knows.”

A beep and blinking lights around the mouth of a corridor startled the three of them.

The Doctor smiled. “There you go.” She waved a hand in the direction of the corridor. “Follow the lights.”

Bill raised her eyebrows at Yaz, who nodded enthusiastically, and they jumped up to follow the lights.

Bill picked up the conversation again as they followed the blinking lights that looked almost bioluminescent in the cave-like corridors.

“My point is,” she said, “I get where you’re coming from.”

“What– No, you don’t– I mean,” Yaz glanced at her, flustered. “We’re friends!” She sped up walking so Bill couldn’t see her face.

“Okay, okay I won’t push but, if you ever wanna talk–”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Yaz said, rounding a corner and stopping in her tracks. Bill came to stand next to her. They were looking into a room full of musical instruments. Some really old ones that Bill suspected might have belonged to some famous musicians, some incomprehensible things that must be alien because they looked like you needed seven hands or three mouths or limbs that humans didn’t even have to play them, and on a stand, with a spotlight on it, a really nice electric guitar.

Yaz’s eyes widened. “She plays that?”

Bill nodded enthusiastically. For a second they just looked at it. Then Bill grabbed it from the stand and made her way back to the console room with it. Yaz ran after her.

“Found it!” Bill said upon entering. Ryan was just climbing out of the Tardis.

“Awesome,” he said when he saw the guitar.

The Doctor was already walking towards Bill, arms outstretched to take it from her, but she wavered when Bill handed it over, putting the strap over her head slowly, eyes on the guitar.

“Don’t know if I can still play it,” she said, quietly, like she was embarrassed to admit it, or embarrassed of admitting to the fear that Bill felt buzzing between her words. Her hands, grimy from the work she’d been doing with Ryan on the Tardis, moved over the fretboard and strings exploratorily. She stretched and curled her fingers a few times, trying to get a feel for the old guitar in new hands.

“It’s a bit of a gamble you know,” she said, “whole chunks of memory get erased. Or no, not erased, that’s not right. More like, buried,” she was explaining but seemed to be talking more to herself than to them. “Riding a bicyle, names, faces, whole years, how to use spoons, entire languages sometimes...”

Her fingers silently made the shapes of chords over the fretboard. Bill didnt know if they were the right shapes but it looked encouraging.

“Musical instruments” the Doctor said quietly.

Then she looked up at them, sparkle in her eyes.

“Alright, let’s try it then.”

Tentatively, she struck a chord. It played through the whole Tardis as if there were speakers hidden everywhere. She plucked a string. A couple more times. Her fingers seemed to find the notes on their own.

After a short improvisation, she looked up at them.

“You’ve still got it,” Bill said.

“Hang on,” Ryan said, “you can’t ride a bike either?”

The Doctor grinned. “Nah, I doubt it. Any requests?”

They spend the rest of the whatever-passed-for-evening-in-space requesting songs and watching the Doctor play them. Or start playing them and then veer off into a completely different song they’d never heard before. Or just play an entirely different song when she didn’t like their suggestions. Eventually Graham joined them and they all made fun of his song suggestions except for the Doctor who’d apparently learnt and liked some of those songs when they were popular on campus.

At one point Bill turned to Yaz, grinning as if to say ‘see? total grandad’ and Yaz just shook her head at her, grinning too, having too much fun to care much about Bill’s teasing.

* * *

Later that whatever-passed-for-night-in-space, when the party had wound down and everyone had gone looking for their bedrooms, Bill wandered through the Tardis following the faint sounds of guitar and found the Doctor alone in a room that was vaguely reminiscent of their old office at St. Luke’s. She knocked on the open door. The guitar squeaked and the Doctor turned around, smiling when she saw Bill.

“Hey Bill” She nodded her head for Bill to come in.

There was no desk but the windows were there, light like from a late summer afternoon streaming in from an undetermined place.

The Doctor turned back to a window and kept playing a slow, sort of melancholy melody. Bill took it as permission and walked around, looking at the books on the shelves and the things on the side tables. She hadn’t noticed any pictures when she came in but her eye kept meeting people, smiling at her from unexpected places. Peeking out from between the books, from behind a globe on a table, on the mantle, in the windowsill, on the walls. You didn’t notice them until you did. Each person in each photograph asking in turn for your attention, your acknowledgement. Unobtrusive but inescapable, they breathed histories.

“I’ve never seen this room before,” Bill said, finding the picture of the woman the Doctor had had on their desk at St. Luke’s next to a worn blue book.

“Don’t come here often,” the Doctor said, turning around. She saw who Bill was looking at and, glancing down at her guitar for a moment, changed the melody she was playing. It became faster, more dangerous, more exciting. It made Bill feel like running for her life and jumping out of spaceships and dancing on volcanoes and running out of time. It felt like devotion.

Bill picked up a picture of a woman with a very bisexual haircut and the Doctor changed her melody again. It became slower, felt like mystery and mischief and memories. Bill was pretty sure she’d heard it before.

She found the picture of a woman with long ginger hair and a man laughing and smiling together at what looked like a christmas table, on the mantle piece, like family photos. The Doctor’s melody faltered a little, repeating the same note a couple of times, searching. She screwed up her face and closed her eyes and let her fingers find the memory. The one repeating note evolved into a sweet and wondrous melody that sounded like fairytales and lullabies. Bill put the picture down.

“Did I ever thank you for the pictures of my mother?”

The Doctor let the last note ring out and gently put the guitar down. She waved Bill’s implicit thanks away and sat down in the big lazy chair close to the window clumsily, as if she hadn’t sat in it before. As if she’s never sat in any chair before. Bill grabbed a chair close to her and dragged it over to the other side of the room to sit down too. The Doctor watched her with a strange contemplative sort of look. When Bill thought maybe she should start a conversation because the Doctor didn’t appear to be going to, she suddenly said, “I think I should apologise.”

Bill blinked. “For what?”

The Doctor pulled her knees up to her chest on the chair and Bill noticed only then that she didn’t have her shoes on. Or her coat.

“A lot of things–”

Bill started shaking her head in protest.

“I shouldn’t have made you go with Missy.”

Bill stopped shaking her head. Okay, well, that was kind of a sore spot but–

“You don’t have to–.”

But the Doctor nodded determinedly. “I do. I said you’d be s–” her voice squeaked like the guitar, but she pushed through, “ _safe_. I said I’d keep you safe. I promised. And you weren’t. I’m sorry.”

Her eyes were so earnest and sincere and intent, holding Bill’s like she was never going to let her go. When she finally did, Bill looked towards the window, which suggested, more than showed, an outside, and considered.

“I’ve forgiven you,” she said finally, because it was true.

“How?”

Bill shrugged. How did people ever forgive someone? “I knew what I was signing up for.”

“Did you?” the Doctor asked. “Really?” Not a challenge but a genuine question.

“After Heather?” Bill looked at her incredulously. “I think I had a pretty good idea, yeah. I knew serious harm was a possibility. I knew death was a possibility too. And I decided it was worth it.”

“But you got turned into–“

“Sh!” Bill interrupted quickly. “Don’t ever mention them to me again or I’ll unforgive you.”

The Doctor promptly shut her mouth.

“But even so, it was worth it, you know?”

“Don’t say that!”

“But it was! Even if I had died. Permanently. It would have been worth it.” The Doctor opened her mouth again to protest but Bill cut her off before she had the chance. “Look at what I got to see! Who I got to know! A little mortal danger in exchange, it’s a good deal.”

“It’s not little!”

“No, it’s not,” Bill agreed, serious. “But I’d do it again. I _am_ doing it again! Because it’s worth it, to know you. And I think they would agree.” She gestured with her head in the nebulous direction of Yaz, Graham, and Ryan, somewhere in their rooms on the Tardis and only realised when the Doctor’s gaze drifted slowly around the room, that she’d also inadvertently indicated the whole room full of people smiling at them out of pictures.

The Doctor slid backwards in her chair, looking distinctly unhappy, wrapping her arms around her knees, and Bill shifted. Why did the Doctor have the good comfortable nice chair and she had a painful wooden one? The Doctor stood up abruptly, gesturing impatiently for Bill to take the soft chair.

“Uh okay?”

They swapped chairs. The Doctor wiggled on the wooden chair.

“You’re right, that is uncomfortable.” She stood up, looking at the chair like it had personally offended her. “Not even a cushion or anything.”

Bill narrowed her eyes at her suspiciously. “Did you just, read my mind?”

The Doctor looked at her, eyes wide. “Nooooo...” The longer the word went on the more it sounded like a question. She squinted with one eye. “...you said that out loud?”

Bill laughed. “I did not! Is that part of your mindwiping powers?”

She crinkled her nose in dismay and dropped back onto the wooden chair. “That’s not generally what I call it.”’

“What do you call it?”

“A nuisance.”

Bill snorted but the Doctor didn’t look like she thought it was very funny so she changed the subject.

“So what else?”

“What else what?”

“You said you had to apologise for a lot of things.”

“You said I didn’t have to!”

“Oh, so you’re just not going to do it anymore?”

“Well...”

“No, I want to know now!”

“Alright,” the Doctor sat up a bit straighter. “Well, the Missy thing mainly. Also the time you saved the world with your mum and I took credit for giving you the pictures.”

“Oh thanks I’d been waiting for that one!”

“And for yelling at you and accusing you of being an alien impostor,” she looked at Bill, guilty.

That was actually nice to hear. “Happens to the best of us.” Bill shrugged and they smiled at each other. Forgiven and forgotten. The Doctor’s face fell.

“I should’ve been quicker.”

“What?”

“I shouldn’t have wasted so much time! I could’ve prevented it.”

“Doctor,” Bill sighed. “It’s done. I’m done with it. It’s over. We can forget about it.” She looked into the Doctor’s eyes trying to get across that she really had forgiven her when she realised that might not be the issue. She took a breath. “You can forgive yourself now.”

The Doctor looked struck, flinched back, almost made the chair fall over backward. Bill reached out to grab her but she’d already stabilised again.

“I shouldn’t have taken you there.”

“You couldn’t have known!”

“I shouldn’t have let Missy out the vault.”

“To be fair to Missy–”

The Doctor jumped up like her chair had caught fire and began pacing a furious circle around the room. “She doesn’t deserve it.”

“No, she doesn’t. But, to be fair, the Cybermen weren’t exactly her fault.”

The Doctor turned to her. “The Master!”

“The Cybermen were on that ship regardless. And who knows, maybe if we’d gone somewhere else, she’d have passed your test. You believed she’d changed.”

“I was wrong!” Her voice cracked. “She didn’t change. They can’t change. They don’t want to!” Her eyes were ferocious but glassy. Like fire burning behind meters-thick glass. Bill could feel the heat from here, she didn’t want to imagine what it was like from the inside.

She stood up stepped toward the Doctor carefully. “Okay, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to– I just thought–” you might miss her, you might still want her friendship, you’re still hoping, “maybe you can try again one day.”

The Doctor dropped back down on the wooden chair shaking her head. “Too late now.”

Bill sat on the edge of the soft chair.

“What– Could you– What did she–” Oh those questions, still stuck. She took a deep breath and then went with her first instinct. “What happened?”

The Doctor opened her mouth to respond but no words happened. She looked at the floor and shifted on her chair restlessly. Then she exhaled a long sigh and said haltingly, “I– don’t know...” She looked up at Bill. “What happened. I don’t know. I don’t know why.”

That did not really clarify anything but maybe it didn’t need to. Maybe that wasn’t why she was here, why she came to look, why she wanted to ask. Maybe the point wasn’t to help each other heal. Just be around each other while they healed themselves. Witness each other.

Bill nodded. “Okay.”

“Thank you.”

“For what?”

The Doctor smiled softly “For everything, for being who you are. It's more than I deserve.”

Bill grinned and punched her in the arm.

“Ow, hey!”

“Don’t be stupid. Play me something.”

The Doctor’s face brightened. “Yes! I have something for you.” She picked up the guitar again and played a few notes that resolved into a melody that Bill quickly recognised as little mix’s oops. She groaned, sinking her head to her knees. “I hate you so much.”

“It’s good isn’t it?” the Doctor said, so proud.

Bill kept her face against her knees, blinking away the sudden tears in her eyes. “When did you even have time to learn this” she muttered around the lump in her throat.

“I have a time machine! I have time whenever I want. Time is not the boss of me!”

Bill smiled into her knees and, when she had her face under control again, looked up to see the Doctor grinning brightly at her.

Bill watched her play through the rest of the song, faces of old friends and loved ones smiling at them from all around. Strangers she would one day join in this room. Not often visited, but never forgotten.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so i found out that INSIDE the word 'genesen' (or like, genezen, as we say in dutch, which is my language, which is why i thought this was so cool, it's less apparent in the english word 'recover') the 'nes' means 'to return safely home' and so there's this inherent entwining of recovering and coming home and that gave me a lot of feelings generally about life, and also about the doctor. inside the concept of recovery is the concept of coming home. thats a lot.
> 
> THANK YOU to anyone who's read this whole story and anyone who's commented and left kudos. thats really nice of you, i hope you liked it! i mean you probably did if you commented or left kudos but still, thanks! also this is the ending so i could have run it into a ditch here you know, the ending is the most important part. and i dont think im entirely satisfied with this ending. but it's the best im going to make it i think. for now. so ummm i hope it's good enough
> 
> this is like the longest thing ive ever written up till now so thats cool. i learnt a lot. mostly that i dont know how to describe facial expressions. and also that i am a sucker for references to old companions or callbacks to specific lines. it's low fruit but it's nice. love it when it happens in the show, love it in fic, love to write it.  
> also, writing plot is boring and i keep zigzagging just around it like those olympic slalom skiers


End file.
